The Seventh Tide Page 20

  ‘I’d honestly forgotten what it was like before,’ murmured Interrupted.

  Gladrag was taking deep breaths of the clean sea air. She nodded, and then frowned as a thought struck her.

  ‘You know that thing the boy did – with the viewing disc?’ she said, turning to the others.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did the Queen know, do you think? That you could do that?’

  ‘I’m pretty sure not,’ said Market. ‘She looked as shocked as anyone when the boy dived in like that.’

  ‘Yes, I think so too. But…’ Gladrag’s face was troubled.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘She knows now.’

  There was an anxious pause.

  ‘There’s no viewing disc on the Island, though, surely?’ said Interrupted.

  ‘No, no. Sufficient unto the day, eh?’

  ‘Eh?’

  But Market was frowning now too.

  ‘Did either of you know you could do it?’ he asked.

  Gladrag and Interrupted shook their heads.

  ‘And if we had known, would we have been tempted to, you know, stick anything in there?’

  The G thought about those vertiginous depths and shuddered.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Market. ‘And,’ he added with a sigh, ‘that’s “the last prevarication that time allows”, as our dear friend so sweetly put it.’

  The three looked sheepishly at each other. It was so peaceful to just be on their own beach, alone with the sky and the waves.

  ‘What about poor old Hurple?’

  Market looked down at the lifeless ferret cradled in his arm.

  ‘We can’t just leave him out in the open,’ said Interrupted anxiously.

  So they carried Hurple to the high ground beyond the grass dunes. Interrupted made a sort of nest and they tucked him away in the shelter of the rocks. There was nothing more they could do for him now.

  ‘Gulls?’ suggested Gladrag, but the others shuddered.

  ‘Too cruel. That’s the Queen’s territory!’ said Market.

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Oystercatchers,’ said Interrupted firmly. ‘I’ve always liked oystercatchers!’

  FAQ 814: What are ‘spring tides’ and can you explain why they don’t just happen in the spring?

  HURPLE’S REPLY: Spring tides occur when the sun, the moon and the earth are in a line. They have very high high tides and very low low tides. Given that they happen all during the year it might seem foolish to call them ‘spring tides’, except that they aren’t actually called that after the season but after the German word springen, which means ‘to leap up’.

  But then there’s also the moon’s orbit to take into account – it’s more sort of oval-shaped than a tidy circle. This means that sometimes the moon passes closer to the earth (perigee) and sometimes further away (apogee). So when the full moon is also a relatively close moon, the difference between low and high tides is even greater. But if you want to see a truly spectacular range of water height what you want to get is the line-up of the sun, moon and earth being so exact that there is a lunar or solar eclipse happening at the same time as the moon is the closest it comes to the earth. Now that’s exciting!

  ‘Daft and cheerful,’ Market agreed. ‘Much more us!’

  Without fuss, the three G shifted into the clown-coloured feathers of three oystercatchers and took off into the onshore breeze. They made a brief circle over their well-loved island, then moved away northwards under the rising moon on purposeful wings.

  ‘That really is low, even for a spring tide,’ said Market, looking down. ‘It doesn’t look… normal.’

  ‘Well, it’s a chancy time of year, isn’t it?’ said Gladrag uneasily. ‘I’m sure Supernova Tangent would remind you of the details if she were here!’

  ‘I could do with one of her lectures on Samhainn, spring tide and orbital perigee round about now – and I never thought I’d hear myself say that!’ said Market.

  ‘Do either of you know when we’re due another eclipse?’ asked Interrupted.

  Market tried to count on his fingers, but stopped when he began to lose altitude.

  ‘Oh, boy’ he said.

  They looked anxiously up at the full moon. It was still white and clear, but as it reached its high point in the sky, the G knew that would change. The shadow of the earth would gradually fall across its face and the moon would darken to orange, then red. ‘Blood Moon.’ That’s what it was called.

  And strange, uncanny things happened under a moon like that.

  The Island was in sight now, looking like a weird loaf of bread that hadn’t risen properly in the oven. Towering hexagonal columns of basalt were capped by turfed overhangs, and the whole place slanted south to north like a gigantic wedge. Normally the sea broke against the jumble of ancient lava, surging into innumerable caves and crevices and leaving the black basalt scoured grey up to the high-tide mark. But this night it was different. Stretching out with the Island as its centre was an expanse of mud, rock and weed. Forests of kelp, several storeys high, majestic in their proper element, drooped now under their own weight and lay like dank hair over the rocks. Creatures not normally exposed to the air scuttled and gulped and dragged themselves away. The deepest places still held water, salt rivers and lakes between the jagged mountains and valleys of the sea bed. This was low tide as it was not meant to be.

  FAQ 736: What’s Samhainn? Is it the same as Hallowe’en?

  HURPLE’S REPLY: They belong to the same family, anyway! Samhainn begins at dusk on 31 October, which is the eve of the new year in the Celtic calendar. The Celts saw it as a gap in time, where the human world and the Otherworlds came together. The Celts thought of time as going from darkness to light, so the Celtic day started at dusk and lasted until dusk of the next. That’s also why their year started at the end of summer – the beginning of the dark winter – and continued till harvest time of the next year.

  Gladrag moaned softly to herself.

  ‘There they are,’ said Market, pointing ahead with his beak.

  The main Kelpie vortex was clearly visible, a huge impossible column of water balanced on the top of the cliffs. It seemed to reach for the moon, but they knew that lifeless rock wasn’t what it wanted. There were no souls to suck on the moon.

  It was waiting for them.

  Even from this far away, they could feel it. All the joy of flying, of being feathered and streamlined and strong, drained away until there was only the effort left.

  The closer they approached, the harder it became to keep going.

  ‘Do we really have to go?’

  ‘I mean, it’s not as if we’re going to make any difference. It’s entirely up to the children now.’

  ‘That’s right. And it’s not as if we won’t know what happens. We’ll know soon enough how it ended. They only have till dawn.’

  ‘We serve no useful purpose just keeping watch.’

  ‘It isn’t as if we’ve done a lot of good so far, either.’

  They were all in perfect agreement. There really was no earthly point in going to the Island.

  They went anyway.

  16 Blood Moon

  The actual arrival of the three G on the Island was faster – and less elegant – than they might have wished. The dead air surrounding the Kelpie vortex offered no real buoyancy or currents to glide in on, so it was more of a collapse out of the sky than a proper landing. The humans who appeared out of the bird shapes were bruised and dishevelled and a good bit shaken. Fortunately, even though the G avoided the Island whenever possible, the place was included in their robe-distributing system.

  The Queen seemed surprised at first to see them, but she recovered almost immediately into a default sneer.

  ‘So glad you could join us,’ she half-purred, half-snarled. ‘And don’t worry My people wouldn’t dream of touching you before the Tide is complete. Why break the Rules when so soon you will be a legitimate… menu item.’

  The G stared
at each other, bemused.

  ‘What does she mean?’ muttered Market.

  ‘They can’t touch us anyway – they’re stuck inside the v… v…’ Interrupted’s voice trailed off into silence as he realized that the maelstrom’s outer wall of water was beginning to thin…

  In ones and twos at first, and then in crowds, the vortex was ejecting its cargo, a violent, random birth. Within minutes, the entire top of the Island swarmed with Kelpies – horses, women, men – bucking and screaming and running as if they hadn’t been free in the air for a thousand years. The G were dizzy with all the noise and the swirling motion, not to mention the wholesale mesmerizing that hit them from every side like a solid fog. There was so much the effect was nauseating rather than alluring. The Queen held her place at the centre of the commotion, but she shrieked and jerked convulsively, drunk with the mad expectant ecstasy of her subjects.

  Looking up, the G saw that the eclipse was almost complete, and already the moon’s face had turned a coppery red, as if painted with pale rust or a thin wash of blood. The vortex itself remained, as tall as ever, but transparent now and half its original circumference. Gladrag had a momentary vision of the whole enormous volume of water collapsing in on itself and washing them all away, and thought what a relief that would be… but it didn’t happen.

  The Queen screeched a command and the mad swirl of bodies around them froze. In the silence, hundreds of black eyes turned towards her as she cried,

  ‘To the Pool!’

  She moved away from the vortex, the G trailing after her and swathes of Kelpies opening before. She led them a little distance across the broken ground to a shallow depression and stopped.

  FAQ 678: Why does the moon turn red during a lunar eclipse?

  HURPLE’S REPLY: A lunar eclipse happens when the earth is directly between the sun and the moon, so that the earth’s shadow falls across the moon’s face. The blue part of the sunlight has been scattered in the earth’s atmosphere (which is why the sky looks blue to us) and the remaining red light gets bent round and becomes the colour of the shadow, which then falls on the moon and gives it its coppery shade. Does knowing this make the Blood Moon seem any less weird or portentous? Not in my opinion.

  The Western Isles are blessed with thousands of ponds of sharp, clear water, tinged with peat, stone-drained, icy and fresh. The Pool was not one of these. It was small, perhaps two metres across, its water blurred with algae and slime. It was probably a sort of murky lime-green colour in daylight but under the Blood Moon it showed a horrible thick grey like mouldy soup. And it smelled, a clinging, bad smell.

  ‘Makes you want to go away and scrub yourself with soap, doesn’t it?’ Market murmured.

  Meanwhile, the redness of the moon had intensified – now, at its highest point in the sky, it justified its name. The Queen tipped back her head and opened her arms in welcome.

  ‘Blood Moon,’ she breathed. ‘How beautiful!’

  ‘Very nice,’ said Gladrag, suppressing a shudder.

  The Queen grinned at her, and her teeth glinted red in the weird light. Then, without taking her eyes off the G, she pointed into the seething crowd of Kelpies. Three emerged and stepped up to the far edge of the horrible Pool.

  ‘Equal numbers,’ the Queen explained smugly. ‘One for each of your heroes.’

  The three she had summoned stood there for a moment, to make sure the G were really taking them in. It was a disheartening sight. Two of the Kelpies were towering, strapping men, and the third, a female, was almost as tall and just as magnificently muscled. They were overwhelmingly a match for any of the heroes of old, and the idea of them in competition with three children was, frankly, ludicrous. But there was worse to come.

  The Kelpies began to change, all at once, so that the G struggled to keep track of what was happening. It was the same horrible deforming of shape they’d seen the Queen undergo, an ugly twisting of limbs and face. It looked agonizing. The end result for the two males was the appearance of a monk from Adom’s time and a Guardian from Jay’s. Without understanding exactly how, the G knew these were dangerous shapes and no good would come of them. But the third Kelpie, the female, seemed unable to find her final shape, writhing and shifting continuously –until they realized what she was meant to be. From animal to human to bird to sea creature, the Kelpie was…

  ‘Of all the cheek!’ exploded Market Jones. ‘She’s trying to be us!’

  At which point the Kelpie became a replica of each of the G standing there before her, one after another, ending with a version of Hibernation Gladrag – but with the addition of some truly outrageous curves.

  ‘Well, really! Gladrag huffed, though her two Companions went quite quiet.

  Then the show was over. The Queen clapped her hands, once, and immediately the three Kelpies walked forward to the edge of the horrid murky Pool and dived. The G gasped in horror – surely the water was only centimetres deep? – but there was no sickening sound of the demons hitting the rock bottom. Instead, they simply disappeared, hardly seeming to break the surface gloop.

  There was a moment of appalled silence. Then the Queen leaned over and passed a finger through the slime at the edge of the Pool, lifting a long, green, glutinous rope of it to her mouth and licking it luxuriously.

  ‘Bliss,’ she said.

  ‘Yuck!’ said a chorus of G.

  17 The Seventh Tide

  ‘Where are we?’ said Adom. ‘Is this it? The Dry Heart?’

  The Traveller had dumped them on the rocks at the foot of a cliff, on the scattered stubs of old lava flows. Immediately behind them a towering, vertical slash in the rock led into darkness, but as the three staggered to their feet, they didn’t at first even notice it. Their attention was focused in the other direction.

  ‘It’s gone,’ whispered Jay. ‘The sea’s gone!’

  A weirdly coloured moon lit up an alien scene. The tide had receded beyond the visible horizon, leaving a ragged landscape of slimy puddles and deeper pools divided by exposed rock. Ridges and outcroppings of the sea bed seemed to be seething, as stranded creatures flailed and struggled to reach water again. An eerie wailing sound drifted on the breeze: whales, trapped and cut off from each other in remaining gullies of sea, calling urgently. The air was thick with the rank smell of mud and weed.

  They stared, unable to understand what it could mean. Then Eo gave himself a shake.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll worry about that later. One invigorating challenge at a time.’

  For an instant he sounded just like Professor Hurple, so much so the others turned sharply to him. He looked deathly in the moonlight. They all did. They looked like three children who had been ill in bed for some time and really shouldn’t be up for a good week yet. What they did not look like were heroes, mighty, magnificent, muscly loins girded and weaponry on display. No lighting effect known to art or science could successfully achieve an impression of that.

  Squaring his slim shoulders, Eo headed into the cliff anyway and, with a sigh and a shrug, Jay and Adom followed.

  The cave was high as a cathedral, but no more than a few metres wide – more of a soaring crack than a cave – with a narrow ledge running along one wall. If there’d been any water it would have lapped the edge of it. As it was, the drop from the ledge was straight to the dark floor of the gully.

  The moonlight penetrated only a little way in, then the blackness took over. The three felt their way forward gingerly along the ledge, waiting for their eyes to adjust.

  ‘Well, at least there are no sheep,’ said Adom, trying to sound cheerful.

  ‘We could really do with my torch round about now,’ muttered Jay.

  Eo turned back to look at her, his face a pale smudge in the gloom with a white crescent at the bottom. She realized he was grinning.

  FAQ 116: Why are there so many Underworlds in stories and myths? I hate caves, so you’d never catch me going into one!

  HURPLE’S REPLY: There must be as many Underworlds as there
are peoples who live in sunlight. There’s something about the idea of a whole other world going on under our feet – one that we can’t see and normally can’t get to – that gets our interest sparked. Before there were alien worlds in outer space and the means to reach them, there were cave entrances that led down into the forbidden depths. And there’s nothing like telling folk that something’s forbidden…

  Presumably, subterranean races have stories of brave, rebellious souls boldly going up into the Overworld of blinding brightness and bewilderingly agoraphobic skies.

  I’m sorry to hear about you not liking caves. I must admit I find it hard to understand. Have you considered a nice snug tunnel instead?

  “Yeah, it certainly has been useful – how long ago was it you broke that? First Tide?’

  ‘I wasn’t even on the First Tide! You boys were still on your own then.’

  ‘And how many things did we break, eh?’

  ‘Well, I broke my arm,’ rumbled Adom.

  ‘There! See? My point exactly! Ha!’ – at which point Jay fell off the ledge.

  It was more of a slither than an actual swan-dive, but it still knocked the breath out of her for a moment.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Eo shouted, and ‘I’m coming down!’ Adom called, but Jay had already scrambled to her feet again.

  ‘No. I’m fine. Stay where you are.’ She brushed herself down crossly. ‘You take the high road, sort of thing. It’s too steep here. Maybe it’ll be easier to climb up further in.’

  They continued to inch forward on two levels. The boys were soon forced to go sideways, as the ledge became even narrower. Jay crunched along below them, one hand stretched out in the darkness, the other following the line of the wall.

  ‘You’re noisy enough,’ grumbled Eo. ‘What’re you walking through down there – bones?!’

  Jay froze, one foot in the air. ‘What?!’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ Adom put in quickly. ‘It’s driftwood. Place like this, with the tides and the currents, it’s bound to be full of old driftwood.’