The Tide Knot (16 page)

  We didn’t think of that. This is a good place for mackerel, and once that man settles down to fish, he might stay all morning.

  “Quick, before he sees us.”

  “What about our stuff?”

  Conor has planned everything. We have spare clothes in a plastic bag for when we come out of the water dripping wet. Conor has wedged the bag into a crevice above the tide line, along with our trainers.

  “Hurry, Conor, Faro’s waiting for us.”

  We take one step, then another. The land shelves steeply here. As soon as we enter the water, I know all will be well . It doesn’t feel cold. This is not the chil y sea of ordinary November beaches. It laps up my legs, soaking my jeans. I wade forward careful y so the fisherman won’t hear any splashes. We’re still hidden here, but soon we’ll be beyond the cover of the rocks. We’ll have to dive down quickly.  

  Conor and I glance at each other. He has to trust me now.

  His mouth is set hard. He’s ready for the dive, even though he can’t be sure that I’m strong enough to hold him safe in Ingo. I’ll never really know how much courage it takes because Conor won’t tell  me.

  “Come on, Saph, he’ll see us,” Conor mutters, as if the only thing that worries him is the fisherman.

  “Hold my wrist tight.” He nods. “Don’t breathe, whatever happens. Pull my arm hard if you aren’t getting enough oxygen. I’ll bring us up to the surface.” I take a step deeper, and so does he. The water rises waist deep…chest deep. It begins to lift us so that we can’t keep our balance. We glance at each other one last time, then lean forward and give ourselves to the water.

  We go through the skin. I open my eyes. Bubbles stream past me, the last of my breath rising to the surface. My lungs are empty of Air now. I draw in the rich oxygenated water of Ingo, and my body floods with energy and life. Conor is beside me, his hand tight on my wrist, his eyes shut.

  The next moment, as I knew, as I hoped, as I believed, Faro is there, swimming alongside Conor, holding his other wrist. He smiles that secretive Faro smile, as if he knows something we don’t. “About time,” he says. “I was wondering how long I’d have to wait for you. Quick, we must swim farther out. The water’s too clear here. They could see us from the cliffs.”

  We’re swimming into deeper water. The seabed glides smoothly beneath us, falling away as the sea grows deeper.  

  White sand, dark weed, and rocks. The camouflage patterns of Ingo, where anything could be hiding.

  “I knew you were close,” I say to Faro.

  “Not too difficult, considering how loudly I was calling you.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  Conor says nothing. I turn to check that he is all right. His color is good, but his face is a mask of pain. “What’s the matter, Con? Aren’t you getting enough oxygen?” Faro is holding his wrist. Conor should be fine.

  “It’s not to do with that,” says Faro. “It’s the pain of entering Ingo. Going from Air to Ingo is hurtful for humans.

  Don’t you remember?”

  How could I forget? That burning pain in the lungs, the feeling of being crushed and unable to breathe—

  “I’m so sorry, Conor. I forgot it would hurt you.” I forgot because the transition didn’t hurt me at all . I slipped into Ingo like a fish into water. What does that say about me? I glance down at myself quickly. My feet and my legs in jeans look puny next to Faro’s powerful seal-dark tail.

  They are definitely human feet and human legs. Whatever’s going on in my mind, my body is still completely human.

  After a few minutes Conor feels well enough to speak.

  “That was the worst yet,” he says grimly.  

  I squeeze his hand. “But it should be getting easier each time. Isn’t that right, Faro?”

  “Not for everyone. Sometimes each journey across the elements is more difficult than the last. You have too much Air in you, Conor. Too much Air and too much Earth.”

  “How would you like it if I said you had too much Mer in you?” retorts Conor.

  “I am what I am.”

  “That goes for me too.”

  There is always this sense of challenge between Conor and Faro.

  “Where’s Elvira?” I ask, because Conor will want to know but will never ask.

  “She’s with our mother. They went away together. Elvira is learning the healing of coral wounds.”

  “What?”

  “Elvira is a healer, or she will be one day.”

  “When did they leave?” asks Conor abruptly.

  “This morning.”

  Conor says nothing, but I guess what he’s thinking.
If
Faro knew we were coming, Elvira must have known too.
 

 
She could have come with Faro, but she chose not to.

  We are moving steadily away from shore on the back of a gentle current, about twenty meters below the surface. The light is clean and clear. Forests of weed reach up toward us, like arms that want to hold us tight. Small mackerel flicker through the weed. Their green and silver and black stripes shimmer in the underwater light, and they look as if they’re playing a game of hide-and-seek. They look so free. They don’t know about the white marble slab at the fishmonger’s down by the harbor, where their brothers and sisters lie in rows, waiting to be sold. I swim faster. I don’t want to catch the mackerel’s innocent eyes.

  “We want to meet your teacher,” says Conor to Faro.

  “He means Saldowr,” I say.

  “It’s possible,” Faro agrees. “Although you have chosen your time for meeting, not his.”

  “Could we go to him now?”

  “Why not?”

  I’d forgotten Faro’s way of answering a question with another question and just how annoying it is. As soon as this thought crosses my mind, he gives me a quick, cheeky grin.

  “Get out of my thoughts, Faro! They’re private.”

  “You’ll have to learn to stop me then.”

  “All right. You wait!”

  I think of a portcullis I once saw in a film about a medieval castle. It was a huge black grate of metal with sharp spikes pointing up where someone might try to climb over. Once it slid down into place, no invader could get past it. I’m going to slide a portcullis down over my mind to guard my thoughts. Faro won’t be able to climb over the spikes. But I’m not sure that it will work. Faro is as slippery as water. I might not be able to keep him out.

  “Did he read your thoughts, Saph?” demands Conor.

  “Only because I let him. And I don’t feel like letting him anymore.”

  “I’d hate anyone to read my thoughts. It must be like being burgled inside your head.”

  “Conor, you’ve become even more human since I saw you last,” Faro observes wryly.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” answers Conor.

  Faro always wants to draw a clear line between the Mer and humans. I check myself hastily because I don’t want Faro to see this thought. But it seems that I’m safe this time.

  The portcullis is in place.

  “So, tell  me. Why do you want to see Saldowr?” asks Faro. “What need have you of his wisdom?”

  “He’s wise, then, is he?” asks Conor. I’m a bit shocked.

  Of course Saldowr must be wise if he’s Faro’s teacher.

  “He has more wisdom in one of his fingers,” says Faro haughtily, “than the greatest philosophers of Air have in the whole of their cloven bodies.”  

  Conor winks at me. “Fine. Sounds like he’s our man,” he says aloud.

  Does Faro suspect why we want to talk to Saldowr?

  Probably. Suddenly I have an idea. I want to see how Faro reacts if I let an image of Dad rise in my mind. It’s hard. I don’t want to do it. I want to swim along like this, in the peace of Ingo, between my brother and my friend. I don’t want to remember Dad as he was in the pool in the moonlight, close enough for me to reach out and touch him but caught between two worlds.

  Dad’s face is there in my mind. Every feature is heavy with pain. It’s there in brilliant detail, like a portrait. I let the portcullis rise. I open my mind, and as I do so, Faro swerves violently, as if he’s seen a shark.

  “When did you see this?” he demands.

  “A few nights ago.”

  “He broke the law of the Mer in coming to find you. What did he tell  you?”

  “She doesn’t have to tell  
you
that,” says Conor, not aggressively but as if stating an obvious fact. “And why should our father be ruled by the law of the Mer when he is human?”

  “Conor, please
don’t
!” We’re in Ingo now, and Conor depends on Faro. The stakes are too high for a quarrel.

  “Your father chose Ingo. That means that he also chose to live under the law of the Mer. He can’t go back on his choice now unless he wants to become a renegade. A traitor to the welcome he found in Ingo’s arms.”

  “But we aren’t sure that it was a free choice, and besides, Faro,” Conor goes on calmly, “this argument is one we must have another time and not with you. Do you know our father?”

  Faro and Conor are swimming close to each other, because Conor must hold Faro’s wrist. They turn, face-to-face, then look away. I’m struck by the similarity between them, which is as strong as the sparks of hostility that leap between them. Both have dark hair, dark eyes, brown skin.

  The resemblance goes deeper than that, to the fire of their sudden anger and their determination not to back down. But they are different too. Faro is watchful, teasing, secretive.

  Conor’s spirit is open and generous. They are both strong. I don’t know which of them, if either, is the stronger.

  “I know him,” answers Faro at last. “He is—” but he breaks off.

  “He’s what?”

  “You must ask Saldowr. I was about to say something that Saldowr should tell  you.”

  I’m afraid of what’s unfolding so quickly now. I have longed and longed for answers about my father, but now that it seems as if we may get them, I’m afraid. I don’t know what to feel about Faro either. Has he deceived us by keeping his knowledge of our father from us, or wasn’t it his secret to keep? I don’t want to believe that Faro has deceived me or played games with me. Not about something as important as this.

  “How far is it to Saldowr?” I ask at last.

  “It’s not far to the current that will take us there. And then half a day’s journey.”  

  We make our journey on a current that is broad-backed and immensely strong. It is much too strong for us to enter it directly. The force would knock us aside or even injure us, Faro says. Instead we join it by means of a small er current, which flows into the larger like a tributary into a river. The three of us swim close, pressed together inside the surging rope of water that hauls us through Ingo a hundred times faster than we could ever swim. Ingo swirls around us. The seabed is so distant, it’s invisible. Inside the current, at its heart, there’s a strange peace. We rush onward, facedown, staring into the Deep below us.

  “Have you ever been to the bottom of the ocean?” asks Conor.

  Faro says the Mer can’t swim down that far, or the pressure of the Deep would crush them. Only strange creatures that have adapted themselves to the dark and the weight of water can live at such a depth. Sometimes they float to the surface like monsters.

  “I thought you’d be able to go anywhere in Ingo,” I say, surprised.

  “Can you go anywhere on Earth?”  

  I remember Everest and the Antarctic and the Sahara. “I suppose we can, but it’s not easy. You have to have special clothing and equipment.”

  “Typically human,” Faro remarks. “Show you a place where you aren’t meant to live, and immediately you want to go there.”

  “We aren’t meant to live in Ingo, and here we are.”

  “Of course you’re meant to be here,” says Faro, as if he’s stating the most obvious thing in the world. “Do you think that every human creature who ventures into our world gets such a welcome? No. From the moment my sister first saw your brother—”

  But at that moment the current humps its back like a snake and begins to whip round on itself in circles that whirl faster and faster, dragging us with it. Faro’s face changes.

  With a shock I realize that for the first time since I’ve known him, he’s afraid.

  “Rogue current!” he shouts. “We’ve got to get out!

  Sapphire, kick out! Swim for it!”

  Faro lets go of me to grab Conor with both hands. One moment we’re together, and then I’m torn away by the current. I catch a last glimpse of them whirling away from me, and then they vanish. The current snatches us apart like the wind blowing rubbish along a gutter. I tumble over and over, blinded by my own hair, rushing down an endless tunnel in the current’s roaring heart.  

  I’ll never know how far I traveled. I think I must have lost consciousness. I don’t remember anything except what felt like a hand wiping across my mind, wiping me into sleep.

  I wake in the dark. Hollow, booming, echoing dark. But it’s not complete darkness. There are grains of light in it.

  Thick shadows loom and then vanish. I try to move my hand, but it’s so slow, so heavy. The water weighs me down, as if a mountain had fallen on top of me.

  Painfully, I turn my neck, searching for Conor, Faro.

  Nothing but dense dark water everywhere. I peer upward, searching for the brightness of the surface. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong direction. I’ve got to find the surface.

  That must be the seabed down there. But no, perhaps I’ve been tossed over and over so many times that I’m floating upside down without knowing it. If I swim toward what I think is the surface, then I might be swimming down into the depths of the ocean.

  Conor would never be able to breathe down here. He must be with Faro; he’s got to be. When the current struck, Faro knew he had to help Conor. That’s why he grabbed hold of Conor with both hands and let go of me, because he knew I could survive alone. Yes, Faro and Conor must be together, safe, searching for me. No other possibility is going to enter my mind.

  I’ll swim in any direction for a while and see what happens. If it grows darker, I’ll know I’m heading the wrong way, down to the seafloor. If it grows lighter, then that must be the way to the surface.

 
And what good will it do if you come up to the surface
hundreds of miles from home?