Lost Children of the Far Islands (20 page)

Morning was just breaking over the sea with a steely, sunless light. They were standing in a shallow cave, more of an impression, really, in the sheer rock face. In front of them, waves rolled and broke on the jagged rocks that ringed the entrance to the cave. It wasn’t much of a shelter, and they were quickly soaked through by the salty spray of the breaking waves.

The Móraí turned to where Gus and Leo huddled against the rock. She spoke quietly, but somehow they could hear her over the crashing surf. “I did not mean for it to be like this.” Her face creased slightly, as though a pain had passed through her body, but she shook her head and kept speaking, quietly but urgently.

“You must go after Ila. You will find that it is easy to track her, once you are in your true forms. When you find her, wait for me. You must not fight the Dobhar-chú alone. Together we can defeat him, but none of us is strong enough to do it on our own.”

Gus nodded, but Leo thought back to what he had read in the book. Whoever killed the Dobhar-chú would also die. The Móraí was going to sacrifice herself for them.

“But you can’t,” he began to say.

The Móraí cut off his protest with a quick, sharp shake of her head. “I will hold back the wolves. I can buy you some time, but not much. I will come as soon as I am able.”

She bent down and held Gus’s face between her hands. She looked into Gus’s eyes, and then, without any warning, she kissed Gus on the forehead. Then she did the same to Leo.

“Now, quickly, take hands.”

Gus squeezed Leo’s hand as hard as she could. Her face was soaked with salt water and she could barely see
the Móraí through the spray that was all around them. She could feel her heart pounding in her chest.
Think of Ila
, she told herself.
Nothing else
.

“I’m ready,” she said.

“I’m ready too,” Leo said beside her.

A chorus of howls rent the air above their heads.

“Now,” the Móraí called. “Lost Children, come!”

Gus and Leo were plunged into darkness.

They could feel their hearts beating, and their fingers gripping each other’s, but they could neither see, nor hear, nor smell anything at all. It was the darkness of a star waiting to be born, without light, or heat, or sound, or motion to propel it or to hold it still. Just nothing, everywhere, pressing in on them, filling them with nothing and nowhere and endless and forever.

They suddenly heard seals calling wildly, from far away, and behind that the dimmer howling of wolves, but then a rushing forward propelled them and they heard, beyond the seals and the wolves and the crash of the sea, the sound of stars calling to them like distant wind and music wound together. Throwing back their heads, Gus and Leo answered the stars, releasing their grips on one another’s hands to open their arms wide, and wider, and wider still to the wild water and the waiting skies.

The two seals moved instinctively forward, toward the comfort of the sea. Once in the water, they surfaced and looked at the beach. The Móraí stood with her back to
them. Her arms were stretched over her head and her long white hair was plastered to her body by the wind that whipped around her like a miniature tornado. The wolves, reaching the beach, crouched low in a ring around the old woman, biding their time, choosing their moment to leap.

Her words came faintly to them on the ragged, blowing sea wind. “Swim,” she was shouting. “Swim!”

The seals dove in unison. Soon they were alone in the dark water that the light could not reach. They evened out then, and sped forward for a while until they had to breathe.

Gus torqued her powerful body and shot upward, racing faster and faster to the surface and then bursting out with an enormous exhalation of spent air,
woofing
and looking around as she did so. A second sleek head broke the surface next to her.

They hung in the water side by side for a minute, basking in the joy of being in the sea in these bodies again. Then they began to search for Ila. Seals do not have good vision on land, but below the water’s surface their large round eyes can pick out details that humans could never hope to see. So they began by looking, diving and circling and peering into the murk for any sign of a swimming fox or a little seal. When that search turned up nothing, they tried listening, and finally smelling the water for any traces. They found nothing.

Then, without thinking much about it, Gus began to
move her upper lip back and forth as she swam, feeling with the stiff whiskers on her muzzle for any disturbances in the water. Almost immediately, she sensed several vibrations. One, a light, flicking sense of motion, was a school of fish darting somewhere out in front of her. Another, more sonorous vibration was too ponderous to be anything but a right whale, slowly cruising the shallows for its favorite plankton.

But then her sensitive whiskers picked up something else, a vibration that was neither fish nor mammal. If it had a been a color, she would have described it as golden—a golden thread sparkling in the Atlantic as it stretched from Loup Marin behind them to the deeper water and beyond. Gus knew, without a doubt, that what she was sensing was the passing of the Bedell’s magical gnome-made boat, the skidbladnin. She turned to Leo, who hung in the dark water beside her. He nodded his head once and they fell into formation, Leo just behind Gus, their whiskers trembling as they caught hold of the tenuous quivering sensation that would lead them to Ila.

The invisible thread took them forward effortlessly. Soon Loup Marin, the wolves, and the old woman who held them at bay so that the children could escape were nothing but a memory in their fast-moving wake, fading behind them in the sweet wind and distant cries of gulls, far up in the unbroken blue sky.

As Gus and Leo traveled under the surface of the sea, they discovered that they could communicate with one another. To their human ears, it might have sounded like the high-pitched squeals, tweets, and whistles of a radio searching for a station. But to their seal ears, it was language. When they had first Turned, with the Bedell’s help, they had been too dazzled by their new forms to think about speaking. But this time, they were more comfortable. They could move without thinking, and take in the vast sensory input of the sea without being overwhelmed.

“More slow you!” Leo cheeped to Gus, who slowed down without realizing at first that Leo had spoken to her, and that she had understood it.

“Speak?” she chirped.

Leo came back with a burst of chirps and static that meant, broadly, “Yes. This is how we talk in these bodies.”

He wasn’t exactly saying that, of course. The seal
language seemed to be much more general than human speech. It did not, for example, include either past tense or future tense. When Gus tried to ask Leo how long he thought they had been swimming, the best she could do was “Swim long or short?”

But it worked. They could communicate.

They swam side by side for a while, practicing their new speech. Their bodies knew the language, even as they groped for words.

As they tuned into one another, they realized that they could hear other creatures speaking as well. There was the light chatter of fish (who talked only about food, food, and food). There was also the heavier, cello-like singing of a passing pod of killer whales. Their language was far more complicated than the seals’, and Gus and Leo had trouble understanding it. They appeared to be arguing about the density of water as it related to its coloration, but neither seal could be sure.

They never saw the whales, which was just as well. If Leo had found the words for it, he would have told Gus that killer whales are called apex predators. That means that nothing hunts the killer whale, and it hunts everything. Leo struggled to convey this information, but the best he could come up with was a series of clicks and squeaks that meant something like “Danger, all kill not us, yes?”

Gus understood what he meant, and the two seals swam faster. Gradually, the killer whales and their debate faded, to be replaced by the clicking and yapping
of dolphins, the low groans of tuna, and the constant chatter of the smaller fishes. The ocean could be quite a noisy place, Gus and Leo were discovering.

But then, quite suddenly, the sea around them fell silent. The chattering and singing and even the light chirps of the smallest fish stopped abruptly. A school of haddock dashed by, going the other way, their silvery bodies like hurrying ghosts in the water.

The vibration that was the passing of the skidbladnin stopped abruptly. In front of them was a wall of fog. Not the usual kind of fog, which sat just above the water or, occasionally, touched its surface, where it immediately broke into the water droplets that formed it. This fog was somehow keeping its shape
in
the water, extending as far down as either seal could see.

Gus and Leo hung in the strangely silent sea for a moment, looking at the fog. They knew what it was—the Folk’s fog that kept the Dobhar-chú trapped on his island prison. And its existence meant that the Móraí was still alive.

With this fact buoying their spirits, the seals swam to the surface to breathe. From there, they could see that the fog hung like a curtain, completely hiding what might be behind it. The seals grabbed great lungfuls of air and then, with a nod to one another, they dove.

The fog-filled water felt thick and cold, even to their insulated seal bodies. They could feel no motion, and no wakes from the moving bodies of fish. The utter emptiness of the water was frightening. They swam
slowly, so close together that their flippers brushed as they moved.

They came out of the fogbank side by side to find themselves in dark water. Then, suddenly, Gus’s whiskers picked up a shape. A large shape, moving fast. It was far bigger than either of the seals and it seemed to be coming in their direction. Gus risked a slight chirp to Leo, who acknowledged her sudden fear. He had felt it too. Instinctively, the two seals hung totally still in the water, waiting to see what other information they could gather. That was when the great white shark exploded past them.

It was their stillness that saved their lives. Sharks can sense the changes in water pressure that happen when a fish thrashes around. Luckily for Gus and Leo, they had been still, and the shark’s first rush took it past them. They could see its sleek form, overslung jaw, and one small black eye as it passed. Without thinking, communicating, or hesitating, the two seals dove and swam.

What also saved their lives was how little distance they had come. They tore through the fogbank and into the open sea before the great white could attack again. The shark was right behind them, but when it got to the inner edge of the fog, it slammed to a halt as if hitting a brick wall.

Sharks don’t communicate with sound, but Gus and Leo both heard the giant creature thrashing in frustration. The two seals surfaced for great gulps of air after their panicked flight from the gray monster.

They hung there, peering into the fog with their weak above-water vision. Nothing moved, but when Gus put her muzzle back in the water and felt around, she could feel many shapes shifting restlessly on the inner side of the fogbank. The Dobhar-chú, it seemed, was not alone in his island prison. Some of the creatures who had fought with him also shared his punishment. Leo remembered the monsters in
The Book of the Folk
. Was there a giant blue squid swimming beyond the fog?

Gus’s and Leo’s seal bodies were made for motion, not strategy. It was almost impossible to think, as seals, about the future. The present moment was just too overwhelming. The smells and sounds of the sea flooded them, even as they tried to consider how they might get past the creatures beyond the fog.

“Fast, me!” Gus barked. “I swim first, and, and …” She stopped, frustrated. What she was trying to say was
I’ll go first and distract the sharks and then you follow while they are chasing me
, but her seal body would not allow her to speak in such detail.

Leo understood enough to disagree. “No!” he barked. Then he dove.

Gus followed him, thinking that he might be planning something foolish. But Leo was hanging in the water just below the surface.

“I call help,” Leo said in the underwater language of the seals.

Gus was puzzled. Call whom? How? There was no word for
book
in the seal language, so Leo could not tell
Gus that he had read in
The Book of the Folk
how the Folk called on the other creatures of the sea to come and aid them in their fight against the Dobhar-chú. He could only show her. So he began to sing.

At first, the sound was halting and hesitant, as Leo struggled to remember the exact sequence of notes that he had read about in the book. But when his voice gained power, rising through the water in a twisting, haunting tune without words, Gus realized that she recognized the music. It was the song that had come out of
The Book of the Folk
when the Móraí had shown it to them. She closed her eyes as Leo sang, listening as the tune moved through the water in waves, spreading out and around the two seals like ripples in a still pond.