The Seventh Tide Read online

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  The Seventh Tide

  ‘I am the Queen of the Kelpies,’ she hissed, ‘and he is mine.

  He opened the way and his soul is ours to feed on,

  according to the Rules.’

  Joan Lennon lives in the Kingdom of Fife in Scotland, on the River Tay. She has a husband, four tall sons, two short cats, and a miscellaneously sized group of piano pupils. Joan was born in Canada.

  joanlennon.co.uk

  joanlennon.blogspot.com

  Books by Joan Lennon

  QUESTORS

  THE SEVENTH TIDE

  The Seventh Tide

  JOAN LENNON

  PUFFIN

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  puffinbooks.com

  First published 2008

  1

  Copyright © Joan Lennon, 2008

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  978-0-14-132667-2

  For my mum, Jean Lennon, who would have had those

  Kelpies dressing warmly, using good reading lights and

  eating vegetables before they knew what had hit them.

  I’d like to thank Kathryn Ross and Lindsey Fraser, my

  agents, and Yvonne Hooker, my editor, for their help –

  there’s many a creek up which (paddle-less) I would

  certainly still be without you! Special thanks to

  Lindsey and my sister Maureen for hand-holding

  provided above and beyond the call of duty, during

  the ridiculously difficult year in which this book was

  being written. And thank you also to Sally and Colin

  for letting me write in their spare bedroom while

  various of my sons restructured their garden, and

  Tyrella Nash at Milton Cottage for the very

  productive times I spent there, writing with one

  hand and guzzling her cooking with the other.

  Contents

  1: Eo

  2: The Challenge

  3: The Throw of Hibernation Gladrag

  4: The First Tide

  5: The Throw of the Kelpie Queen

  6: The Second Tide

  7: The Throw of Market Jones

  8: The Third Tide

  9: The Throw of Lackey One

  10: The Fourth Tide

  11: The Throw of Interrupted Cadence

  12: The Fifth Tide

  13: The Throw of Lackey Two

  14: The Sixth Tide

  15: The Travellers’ Return

  16: Blood Moon

  17: The Seventh Tide

  18: The Dry Heart

  19: Adom

  20: Jay

  21: Eo

  There are places they call ‘liminal’ – where the divisions between present, past and future are thinner than normal. Even the walls between universes aren’t always up to scratch. Things blur and leak into each other in places like that. Connections are made between peoples and times that are against all the rules. Things… break through, good things sometimes, but not always. Sometimes the things that break through are evil, and relentless, and driven by terrible hungers.

  The Western Isles of Scotland is a place like that.

  Dark worlds, bright worlds, worlds (like our own human one) that are peculiar combinations of both – so many realities include this stretch of islands and seas and sky, heart-breakingly beautiful at one moment and deadly the next, full of softness and hardship and terror, and a hundred shades of purple and green, blue and grey.

  In the sixth century, on the island of Iona, there was a boy called Adom. In the twenty-fourth century, in a suburb of Greater Glasgow, there will be a girl called Jay. And in the universe of the G there is Eo, a young shape-shifter-in-training. You’d think there couldn’t be three more different specimens of life in existence, and yet they do have two things in common.

  One – they all live in the same place, in this landscape of chance and change, where the tides are powerful and strange, and the walls of a thousand worlds are thin.

  And two – they don’t always pay attention.

  Professor Pinkerton Hurple’s Answers to Your Most Pressing FAQs appear in boxes scattered throughout the text. They are taken from an ongoing manuscript which the Professor is writing, and which he keeps with him at all times. It is on the subject of pretty much everything. The pages have become quite disreputable-looking over the years, marred by paw prints, stained with rabbit blood, and almost all with the edges thoroughly chewed. (Composition isn’t easy, even for a mind as agile and at the same time cram-packed as the Professor’s.) It is only with the greatest reluctance that he has allowed access to his unfinished masterpiece, but as it’s anybody’s guess when the work will finally be published, he could hardly have expected us to wait.

  1 Eo

  A basically human shape is the default appearance of the G. In fact, before they reach fully trained adulthood, human is all a G can do. So it wasn’t surprising that Eo should look like a boy, since his training still had a long way to go. (His full name was Eo Gofer-Baroque, but that is another story.) According to his current teacher, Professor Pinkerton Hurple, the point at which Eo’s training would finish was actually receding rather than getting closer.

  ‘It’s hard to believe that anyone could know less at the end of a lesson than they did at the beginning – but you manage it. If it weren’t so AGGRAVATING, it would be an interesting phenomenon.’

  At fifteen, Eo gave the impression of being a master of self-confidence and complete bone-idleness – at one and the same time. Having said that, he often did plan to be attentive, but then he forgot partway through. The things going on inside his head were so much more interesting.

  Any self-doubts he had, he kept well buried. If the work threatened to become difficult, he didn’t wait around to find out. He slid out from under such things as neatly as possible, with charm and his own personal brand of deviousness.

  Some of the time, Eo pretended to be more stupid than he really was, just for the fun of it – particularly during lessons with Professor Hurple. He enjoyed watching the Professor’s fur get all bunchy with irritation. The Professor was a ferret and his emotions clearly showed in the state of his coat. A more dapper bea
st at the beginning of a lesson would be hard to imagine; by the end, he was dishevelled and unkempt and fit to be tied – and Eo would have had an enjoyable afternoon, learning not a lot.

  Confusingly, Professor Hurple was not a G. He couldn’t shape-shift. He actually was a ferret (though an exceptionally intelligent one, as he was quick to point out), coming originally from the early twenty-first-century Scotland of the humans. How he came to be in the G universe at all is a story in itself, but not one that Eo had yet managed to wheedle out of him. (Of course, all ferrets are astonishingly good at squeezing through the tiniest cracks or down the most unobvious holes, and all ferrets are enormously curious, so finding a way from one universe to another is not the challenge to them that it would be to most life forms.) And although Professor Hurple had never been human, he had, as it happened, spent more time in their company than any of the G themselves.

  He had also read a great deal, which helps.

  Why would the G need to be educated at all, you may ask, since surely all they have to do is shape-shift into something else to know everything about it, from the inside out, as it were. In fact, the truth is exactly the reverse. Before a G can shift, they have to know as much as possible about the life form they are changing into.

  For example, a G can’t become a clam (at least not for long) without knowing about clam predators, or what to do when the tide goes out, or even (if so inclined) how to tell girl clams from boy clams. But, not surprisingly, individual G then find themselves more comfortable in some shapes than in others. And the more time they spend in that form, the more they learn and the deeper their understanding becomes. Then, as specialists, they pass on their knowledge to trainees. For example, Eo was taught about pack dynamics, how to organize herbivores and the joys of digging by Hibernation Gladrag, currently Head of the G and, most of the time, an extremely handsome Border collie bitch. (Eo paid close attention to these lessons because he quite fancied shifting into some kind of canine, and also because every time his teacher smiled he remembered she was capable of ripping his throat out.)

  Very few of the adult G chose to spend time as human, however. This could be because they got enough of it as children, when human was all they could do. Or it could be because, as a species, they rated fun as the highest goal and being human was often just not fun enough. So the G tended to use the shape only for formal occasions or boring ceremonies or rare moments of unpleasantness with other universes. Which explains why, when a Professor of Human Studies was needed to teach a young G, they were grateful to be able to turn to Pinkerton Hurple.

  FAQ 998: Do the G have horrible, embarrassing parents like mine?

  HURPLE’S REPLY: The G like their young, and are always friendly to their own particular offspring when their paths cross, but not to the point of letting this interfere with their own pursuits. Parenting is seen as pretty much a communal affair. Take our friend Eo, for example. His parents were both ocean birds most of the time – usually gannets – so they were frequently far out to sea, riding the Atlantic storms and diving at wing-ripping speed into frantic shoals of fish. On the upside, this means that when they were around, Eo was in for some fabulously exciting bedtime stories. On the downside, there was always the danger of one or other parent absent-mindedly trying to shove a fish down his throat.

  Today, Professor Hurple had decided he was going to teach Eo the fine art of triangulation IF IT KILLED HIM. ‘Him’ could refer to pupil or teacher – or both – in this case, but whichever way, Hurple was determined. He was convinced that mathematics was essential, the key to whole swathes of human experience, and Eo was going to be introduced to those swathes come hell or high water.

  (It could be proposed that all the events that followed happened result of Professor Hurple’s obsession with mathematics. And his being a ferret, of course, since most mathematicians will not normally eat rabbit unless somebody cooks it first.)

  Eo was receiving this part of his education on one of the most beautiful of the G islands. It was as close to being the centre of G society as any place could be, an unofficial capital, for the simple reason that it was green and pleasant and had beaches of the finest silver. In terms of practical triangulation, the view from its shores offered a number of distant mountain peaks to work out the height of, but to a ferret there were much more interesting problems to solve.

  ‘Now, pay attention, boy! As you can hear, I have placed a beeper –’

  ‘Ooo – what’s a beeper, sir?’

  ‘It’s a thing that beeps – what do you think it is?!’

  ‘Just checking, sir.’

  Professor Hurple narrowed his ferrety eyes suspiciously. He never quite trusted Eo when he started calling him ‘sir’ in that oh-so-innocent tone of voice. Still, I will not be distracted! he thought to himself.

  ‘I have placed a beeper,’ he repeated more loudly, ‘down a tunnel in this deserted rabbit warren. I will give you the length of the tunnel – you may use the horizon as observable from this point – and I would like you to use the principles of triangulation, as explained on a number of previous occasions, to work out the exact depth at which the beeper may be found. Do you understand?’

  Eo nodded earnestly. ‘Yes, sir! Yes, I do… except for one thing.’

  Hurple sighed. ‘Well?’ he said wearily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The beeper. You said it was a thing that beeps?’

  ‘YES?!’

  ‘Well… it’s stopped.’

  What the Professor said next was, thankfully, in Ferret, thus saving Eo’s tender ears. Still, it was quite a safe guess from his tone – and the instantaneous fur muss-up – that he was not best pleased.

  ‘Wait here,’ he snarled (in G this time), and disappeared into the warren.

  Eo grinned contentedly. Old Hurple was certainly good entertainment. He even had some interesting things to say, sometimes. Eo quite liked maths, though it seemed to involve more work than should be absolutely necessary. He lay back on the grass while he waited for the ferret to re-emerge, and looked up into the blue autumn sky.

  The clouds were fat and frisky before a brisk wind, and the tide was on its way out, so the smell of fresh mud and seaweed was strong on the air. Eo rolled over on to his stomach and squinted out to sea, watching the way its colours changed themselves restlessly from bright aquamarine to blue-black and back again.

  It was one of those moments when Eo felt good about life in general, and being Eo in particular. There wasn’t any real reason, beyond it being such a nice day – it just happens like that sometimes.

  After a bit, though, his feeling of well-being began to leak away. He started to wonder a little uncomfortably about what had happened to the Professor. Even an exceptional ferret can sometimes forget other commitments while underground. Not that Eo minded – he never minded not having lessons – but he didn’t want to have to spoil the mood of the day by needing to worry about his teacher…

  He frowned, and put his ear to the ground. Sure enough, there were muffled scuffling noises to be heard, and then a short screech. Then silence. Eo chewed his lip. The scream hadn’t sounded like old Hurple’s voice. But still… If he were an adult, it’d be no problem – he’d just shift shape, into another ferret maybe, and scuttle on down there. Find out what was what. But he wasn’t, and he couldn’t. All he could do was dig down from where he was (and he didn’t even have a shovel) or else go and find an adult G someplace and get them to help. He didn’t like to leave, though. He didn’t really know what to do, so he decided to do nothing for a while longer. That sometimes worked.

  Eo had just reached the point of having to make a decision when, to his great relief, the Professor re-emerged from the tunnel.

  He was looking dreamy and content, in spite of being in dire need of a good grooming. His muzzle in particular had some pretty incriminating red marks round it. He seemed surprised to see Eo.

  Ah… yes…’ he said, and stopped.

  Are you all right?’ asked Eo.

/>   Hurple burped. ‘Pardon me,’ he said. ‘Yes, I am quite all right, thank you for asking. I did, however, make one slight miscalculation. I believe, earlier, that I stated this warren was deserted. I was wrong. Then. But I’m right now!’ He grinned a little sheepishly at Eo and then gave himself a shake. ‘Right,’ he continued, trying to sound a bit more like a proper Authority Figure. ‘Did you bring your bag with you, boy?’

  Eo nodded. School-age G needed sturdy and capacious bags with strong straps. There was no telling what your tutor might want you to carry around or bring to lessons. (Especially if the tutor in question couldn’t carry things very well himself because of not, for example, having any hands.) In Eo’s case, his bag had more of the Professor’s work in it than his own. The ferret never liked to be without his great work, Professor Pinkerton Hurple’s Answers to Your Most Pressing FAQs, and was quite capable of breaking off in the middle of a lesson – even the middle of a sentence! – to get down a new idea that struck him.

  ‘Here it is, Professor,’ said Eo.

  ‘Good. Excellent. It is my intention, at this point, to get into your bag for a period of, uh, meditation. That doesn’t mean wasted time for you, however. You may continue with your essay on “Demon Incursions from the Dark Worlds” for Supernova Tangent. She mentioned to me only this morning that you were not progressing with it as diligently as she could have wiiiii-’

  An enormous yawn interrupted him. Ferrets fall asleep after a meal, in the same way that rivers run downhill and the sun rises at dawn.

  ‘She was not at all sure you’d been paying attention when she explained the special dangers of this time of year to you. Again. You may refer to my manuscript if you need any really strong quotes. Don’t forget to consider the moon… don’t forget… eclipse…’ Hurple could barely keep his eyes open.

  Eo suppressed a grin, and held the mouth of his bag open invitingly. In a blink the ferret was inside, curled up and snoring on his own manuscript and the boy’s notes for his essay. Eo didn’t care. He had no intention of progressing in his understanding of anything today. With a chuckle, he folded the top of the bag over, picked it up carefully and headed down to the shoreline.