Gods and Warriors (16 page)

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.”

T
he 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.