Storm Singing and other Tangled Tasks (7 page)

Yann and Catesby were both yawning as Helen and Lavender said good night. As soon as they were in their own tent, Lavender switched the light on and started fussing over her salt-stained clothes. Helen dropped straight onto her folding bed.

“Aren’t you going to brush your hair?” scolded Lavender. “Or take off your necklace? And you can’t go to sleep in your trainers and your wet clothes!”

“Yes, I can,” Helen muttered, her eyes closed.

“No, you can’t! You’ve been soaked in seawater, and I saw you spill fishcake crumbs down your top. You should put everything you’re wearing in the
dirty-washing
bag. And that coral necklace will leave funny marks on your neck if you fall asleep wearing it. You don’t care enough about your clothes, or what you look like. It’s like sharing a tent with a
boy
!”

Helen laughed, and sat up. She’d never get to sleep with Lavender nagging her. She pulled off her shoes and kicked them under her bed, then peeled off her soggy socks and chucked them towards the dirty-clothes bag.

She reached her hands behind her neck, and swivelled the necklace round to bring the clasp to the front. She stood cross-eyed with her chin tipped down to see the
stiff catch, as her short fiddler’s nails struggled to open the necklace.

Then Helen stopped.

She could see a strand of pink gooey jelly trapped in the silver catch.

Helen jerked at the necklace with both hands.

The cord snapped and coral beads flew all over the tent.

Lavender squealed. “Careful! You nearly knocked me out of the air!”

Helen didn’t answer. She just held the broken cord, and the clasp with its lump of goo, out at arm’s length.

“Look,” Helen said, very quietly. “Look at the clasp.”

Lavender swooped over. “Pale pink? That’s not really your colour.”

“No, it’s the colour of the sea-through.”

Lavender gasped. “The pouch Rona found was filled with things the sea-through was claiming back for the sea. Coral comes from the sea.”

Helen nodded.

Lavender whispered, “Did the sea-through try to reclaim this necklace too? Did the sea-through try to drown you?”

“I think so. It must have squeezed through the sea hole, tied my plaits to the chain, and tried to steal my necklace.”

“Then why didn’t the sea-through get the necklace?”

“It has a really stiff clasp. I only got it off by breaking it. The sea-through must have ripped a bit of skin trying to open it.” She shuddered and dropped the clasp on the floor.

“Why didn’t it break the necklace if it wanted the coral that much?”

“The sea-through couldn’t have broken it without waking me up. Perhaps it thought if I drowned and was underwater, the coral would be back in the sea.”

Lavender hovered above the clasp looking at the goo clue. “So this is suddenly more complicated, but also a lot simpler. Simpler because there’s only one attacker. You and Roxburgh were both attacked by the sea-through. It’s nice to know the mermaids aren’t murderers. But more complicated because it makes no sense at all. What motive does the sea-through have for attacking a selkie at the Storm Singer competition, then attacking a human at the Storm Singer feast?”

Helen was scratching her scalp and rubbing at her neck. Knowing she’d been attacked by a sea-through was making her feel much yuckier than thinking she’d been attacked by mermaids. “Maybe it likes ruining selkie events? Maybe it came to disrupt the feast, saw me alone and took the opportunity to drown me and take the necklace?”

Before Lavender could answer, Helen heard a noise outside. Not the rustle of tent fabric, nor the murmur of the sea. A sudden splash and a faint whisper.

“What was that?” Helen bent nearer to the tent wall.

She heard a voice hissing, “Where is she?”

“Did you hear that?” Helen breathed.

Lavender nodded.

“Where is she and that stolen coral?”

“It’s the sea-through!” Helen sat very still, Lavender hovered beside her, and they listened.

“Where is that nasty girl who ripped my bag? I’ll drown her with her pillow this time. I’ll get that coral back before my midnight meeting, even if I have to cut it off …”

The voice was right outside the tent.

“Who’s it talking to?” Helen whispered. “Are there two of them? Two of them wanting to drown me again!” She was shaking. She couldn’t decide what to do.

“HIDE!” Lavender said, urgently, right in her ear. “HIDE!”

Helen looked around the tent. She couldn’t see anywhere to hide. She was too big to fit behind the rucksacks or the bag of clothes or Lavender’s shoebox bed.

So she slid to the floor and crawled under her own bed, catching her hair on the springs under the thin mattress, and squishing herself into the low space, curled up round her wet trainers.

She heard the faint voice whisper outside, “She’s not in this big tent. I just see that heavy-hooved horse boy and some sky bird. What about the small tent?” The soft hissing moved nearer.

Helen held her breath.

She heard the tent entrance unzip.

Then Lavender called out in a high voice, “Isn’t it nice to have this huge tent all to ourselves, Pansy Petal?” Helen heard her whizzing round the tent, humming to herself.

“I said, Pansy Petal, isn’t it nice to have this tent all to ourselves?”

Helen wondered who Lavender thought she was talking to.

Then Lavender said, even louder and more sharply, “And you’re very lucky to have that huge bed to yourself, even if it is a bit ridiculous for such a small fairy, aren’t you, Pansy Petal?”

Helen suddenly realised who Lavender was talking to. “Oh!” she squeaked, from under the bed, in a tiny fairy voice, “Yes, Lavender. I’m very lucky to have such a big bed!”

She heard the zip creak back up and a soft hiss outside. “Nothing but fabled beasts and fairies in these two tents. The coral thief must be with the other human children. I’ll search their tents before my meeting with the selkie.”

As the hissing whisper faded, Helen crawled out. Lavender was fluttering, very pale, above her bed. “I saw its eye. Its eye was bigger than me!”

“We have to follow it,” Helen said.

“No! It’s out there hunting for you! You can’t follow it! It might see you, with those big gooey eyes!”

“It might hurt the Scouts if it doesn’t find me. And we need to follow it to that meeting, to find out what it’s up to.”

Lavender shook her head.

“Fine, I’ll go myself,” said Helen.

“You could take Yann?” Lavender suggested. “He’s always up for something daft and dangerous.”

“No, getting his attention would make too much noise. Anyway, he’s not built for sneaking about. I’ll go myself.”

“Helen! I can’t let you go on your own. I’ll have to come too!”

Helen grinned, and unzipped the tent.

She was worried it would be difficult to find a transparent creature in the dark, but as soon as they were outside, they could hear the gentle hiss of its constant commentary, “She’s not here … not there …”

Once they were round the first row of Scouts’ tents, they saw a greeny glow.

Helen took a quick step back, and then peered round the tent again.

The glow was coming from a globe-shaped lantern hanging from the sea-through’s fist. When it moved and the light swung round, Helen realised the splashing noise was coming from the globe. It must be filled with water.

The sea-through whispered to the glowing globe. “Driftwood! The sea’s beautiful floating wood. Carved and cleaned by the sea, and these savages are going to burn it! We’ll rescue it. Take it back to the sea.”

The light from the lantern wavered, and Helen saw a fish floating in the water. The glow was coming from a tiny light dangling from its head.

“The sea-through’s brought its own torch,” she murmured to Lavender.

She watched as the sea-through put the driftwood piled by the Scouts’ campfire stones in a huge woven kelp sack. Then it crept up to a tent, held the globe high, and pushed its head slowly through the opening.

Helen gasped.

Lavender chuckled on her shoulder. “It’s ok. It’s not going to find you! You’re not in there.”

“I’m not in there, but other people are.”

The sea-through’s head appeared again. “Boys. Not girls.”

It went to the next tent, and peered in. “Yes!” It was whispering very quietly, and Helen had to strain to catch each word, but it didn’t seem to have the sense to keep completely quiet. “Yes! Girls! But which one has the necklace? Maybe I should just drown them
all
?”

“It’s going to attack them! We have to stop it!” Helen took a step forward.

“No!” Lavender hovered in front of her. “We can’t let it know we’re here, or we won’t be able to follow it to its meeting.”

“But we can’t let it attack the scouts.”

“I know. Let me think.”

Helen watched as the sea-through laid the sack and globe down by the tent, and reached inside, its tentacles unwinding.

“Lavender!”

“I’m thinking …”

“Stop
thinking
, and
do
something, or I’m going to whack it on the head with that driftwood.”

So Lavender muttered some soft words and flicked her wand towards the tent. Suddenly there was a giggle from the tent. Then another. Two different high-pitched giggles. And someone said sleepily, “OI! Who’s doing that!?”

The sea-through jerked back out of the tent. The giggling got louder, and so did the questions. “Who’s … ha-ha … who’s doing that?” “It’s not me … hee hee … please stop!”

The sea-through lurched away from the tent, dragging its sack and lantern behind it.

“What did you do?” asked Helen.

Lavender whispered, “Tickling spell. One of my cousins is an expert at them. I’d been saving it to use on Yann. Come on. Let’s follow it to that meeting.”

So Helen and Lavender followed the glow of the sea-through’s lantern, out of the dark campsite, into the night.

“Ouch!” Helen tried to keep her voice down, but Lavender, floating a few metres ahead, snapped, “Shhh!”

“It’s your fault my feet hurt,” Helen muttered. “You made me take my shoes off.”

They were following the sea-through’s sickly green light along the grass above the shore. Then the light changed direction. “It’s going down to the sea,” Lavender whispered. “We won’t be able to follow if the meeting is underwater.”

The light wavered and stopped halfway down the beach. Helen could feel round pebbles under her feet as she and Lavender hid behind a rusty boat trailer, watching as the sea-through placed the lantern on the stones. The light glowed through its purple toes and the wriggling tentacles round its ankles. It dropped its big sack, and pulled out the driftwood.

“Back to the wet arms of the sea.” The sea-through looked huge in the low-down light, whirling a lump of driftwood round its head and throwing it out to sea. With splash after splash, it threw branches, planks and roots out into the deep darkness.

A voice growled out of the night, “Collecting toys for the sea again, cnidaree?”

“Selkie. You’re late.”

“Better late than obvious, like you sneaking about at our feast. What a ridiculous idea, trying to speak to me there. At least this is private. Though if you make too much noise playing with your toys, we might gather an audience even here.”

“I’m not playing. I am performing my sacred duty. Just as I am part of the bloom, so this wood is part of the sea. I don’t ask a reward for doing my duty. Unlike greedy seals, who take from the sea, then demand rewards for giving something back.”

“You are just throwing litter into the sea. You do not even know if the sea appreciates it.”

“Don’t question my sacred duty! You selkies,
half-land
beings that you are, can never understand.”

The selkie chuckled under his breath. “You have a landform too, cnidaree, or how else could you be here, breathing air, talking to me?”

“We’re granted this disgusting half-human shape so we can leave the sea to retrieve what belongs to the sea. We don’t enjoy it. We don’t sing and dance about it like selkies do. But if our equinox plan succeeds, the sea will be able to seize back so much more than we can ever carry.”

As the sea-through chucked one last piece of driftwood at the waves, Lavender murmured to Helen, “Which selkie is that?”

“I don’t know. We can’t see properly unless the
sea-through
lifts that light up, and I don’t recognise the voice. I’ve mostly met selkies at feasts, speaking loud and clear, not whispering like this. It could be any of the big male selkies …”

Helen moved round the trailer for a better view, but she couldn’t see their faces, just their bare feet and the pebbles.

The low selkie voice said, “Now you have played your games, what do we do next?”

“We? There is no ‘we’ any more. You and your family failed us.”

“We failed
you
? That fiasco today was
your
plan. We did all you asked of us, but it was not enough.”

“We have another plan now, and we don’t need you.”

“But … but …” the selkie spluttered, and Helen almost recognised the voice. Desperate to see who it was, she went further behind the metal trailer and clambered onto the tyre, to see if she could get a better view from higher up.

“But …”

“All we ask of you now is your silence.”

“For my silence, will I still get my crown?”

The sea-through laughed. Helen, teetering barefoot on the wheel, grabbed at the edge of the trailer to hold herself up.

“No, you greedy seal. For your silence, you get to keep your life! Not be stung and swallowed! For a crown, you’d need to give us …” The sea-through’s voice dropped so low Helen couldn’t hear the next few words.

The selkie answered in a despairing whisper, “I can still help. I still have influence. You could let me …”

Then Helen’s bare foot slipped again on the worn rubber of the old tyre. She jerked forward so she didn’t fall off the wheel, and thumped her knee against the side of the trailer. The thud was as loud as a drumbeat.

She heard gasps, then a flurry of splashes.

She scrambled round the side of the trailer, but the lantern had flickered out, and the beach was too dark to see anything. “Light!” she whispered to Lavender. “Light! We need to see who that was.”

Lavender lifted her wand. A circle of bright clean lightballs rose up and floated to the edge of the sea.

Helen saw a shiny head disappear under the water. She sighed. That dark fur could be any seal.

Then she looked nearer to the shore. The sea-through had stopped to pick up its globe and empty sack, so it was still in the shallow water. And it was changing.

Under the bright light, Helen and Lavender saw the sea-through’s skull and skeleton dissolve into its gooey flesh, as its landform twisted into a circle round its own innards, and then spread out into a bell-shaped lump of transparent jelly round the pale pink belly. The sea-through pulsed off into deeper water, its lacy stings stretching and growing into dozens of thick ropy tentacles, which towed the globe and the sack behind it.

“Yuck!” Helen grimaced. “I thought it was horrible when it was on land!”

“It took much longer to transform than the selkie, which changed so fast we’ve still no idea who it was,” said Lavender.

“But we did hear a lot about their plans.” Helen began to limp back towards the campsite.

Lavender snorted. “I’m not sure I know much more than I did. Whatever they were planning today failed, and whatever the sea-through is planning next the selkie can’t help with. What else do we know?”

“We know that whatever it’s doing, it hasn’t given up.”

“And we know it doesn’t like you, Helen, and it still wants your coral necklace.”

“It’s not a necklace any more.”

“The sea-through doesn’t know that. You’re still in danger, so I think we should sleep in the boys’ tent tonight. Anyway, we need to tell them what we’ve heard.”

Helen muttered, “If we can wake them up.”

Lavender laughed. “If prodding them doesn’t work, you could fall off something. That makes enough noise.”

Helen rubbed her bruised knee. “Or you could tickle them!”

The boys had been too sleepy to understand much the night before apart from the need to stop the sea-through attacking Helen. So in the morning, with cold rain outside the tent and a hot breakfast from Sheila’s kitchen inside them, Helen and Lavender showed them the broken necklace and the goo in the clasp, and repeated everything they’d heard.

Even wide awake, no one could make any sense of it.

“What I can’t work out,” said Lavender in frustration, “is whether the sea-through’s other plan is to do with today’s race. If the failed plan was the foiled attack on Roxburgh, is the new plan to attack the Sea Herald contest?”

Helen shrugged. “It didn’t talk about the race or the contest. Just about getting stuff back for the sea. But the selkie mentioned a crown. Is there a crown in the Sea Herald contest?”

Yann and Catesby shrugged too.

“The race starts in less than an hour,” said Helen.
“We have to decide if we’re telling Rona what we heard before the race or after.”

Yann sighed. “I don’t think we should tell her yet. She’s nervous enough already. A conversation about
sea-through
attacks and selkie traitors would not be the best pre-race preparation. She might refuse to compete at all. We should let her race, then talk to her afterwards.”

“Shouldn’t we
warn
her that the sea-through might be out there?” Helen objected.

“But we have no evidence that it is,” Lavender pointed out. “It didn’t mention the Sea Herald contest or the race at all.”

“She won’t be in any danger,” said Yann. “There are judges all over the course. They can’t help her with the obstacles, but they’d intervene if she was attacked by a huge jellyfish.”

Helen shook her head. “I think she has a right to know.”

But the others all agreed with Yann, so Helen put the broken necklace in her pocket, and jogged through the drizzle to Sheila’s house with their breakfast dishes. The campsite was already empty: the tents and bikes were still there, but the minibuses had gone.

As she stacked the plates in the dishwasher, she asked Sheila, who was making their packed lunches, “Where did the Scouts go so early?”

Sheila didn’t turn round, just kept putting sandwiches in bags. “They’re climbing Ben Loyal most of the day, taking their canoes out for a quick test run in the afternoon, then having a barbecue tea on the Scout leaders’ favourite beach. They won’t be anywhere near the race. Rona will be quite safe.”

“Thanks, Sheila. And thanks for breakfast.” Helen grabbed the packed lunches, and ran out to join her friends.

It was nearly eight o’clock when Helen beached the boat on the gentle eastern end of the island. Yann cantered up the hillside, Catesby flapping by his shoulder. Helen snatched Lavender out of the rainy air and sat the fairy on her shoulder. “Shelter in my hair if you feel the slightest breeze,” she ordered as she followed the others.

When she reached the ridge, where the grassy island fell sharply away into cliffs and rocky shore, Yann was already sheltering behind a roofless stone house, so he couldn’t be seen from the mainland.

Helen joined him, and stared at the never-ending, ever-moving landscape of the Atlantic stretching to the north. Then she looked at the rocks below, where a crowd of selkies, blue loons and mermaids surrounded the three contestants.

Tangaroa was limbering up on the huge starting rock with extravagant stretches, and whenever he took a break, two of his friends were covering him in protective oil, which Helen hoped wasn’t made of seal fat. Serena was perched on the edge of the rock, her tail draped elegantly into the small waves below, while two of her friends were winding her hair round her head. Rona was standing on her own, doing breathing exercises which Helen had taught her.

Yann called down, “Good morning, Storm Singer! Are you singing this rain down on us?”

Rona waved. “No, this is just Scotland in September! The rain makes no difference to us, we’ll be underwater most of the race anyway.”

Yann turned to his friends. “On three. One, two, three …” The friends yelled, chirped and squawked, “
Good luck, Rona!
”

Rona waved again, then flapped out her sealskin and became a seal.

“What did she mean, she’ll be underwater
most
of the race?” Helen asked. “Won’t she be underwater the whole time?”

Lavender perched on her hand and gave her a puzzled look. “She has to come up and breathe. So does Tangaroa.”

Helen stood in sudden embarrassed silence, then gabbled, “Of course she does. She’s a mammal, isn’t she? She’s a mammal just like us – not you, Catesby, obviously – but the rest of us. Of course she has lungs, and has to fill them.”

Helen shook her head. She was shocked at herself. She’d assumed selkies could breathe underwater. Why didn’t she know more about her best friend’s seal life? Why hadn’t she asked?

“So,” asked Helen slowly, “how often will she need to come up?”

“It depends how deep she dives,” replied Lavender, “and how long she can spend on the surface recovering, but probably about once every twenty minutes or half an hour.”

“What about Tangaroa?”

This time Yann answered. “He’ll need to come up for air more often, every ten or fifteen minutes.”

“He’s human! How can he stay underwater for fifteen minutes?”

“Human free divers can stay under that long without air,” said Yann in his lecturer voice.

“How do you know all this?”

Yann grinned and lifted a hoof. “One step ahead of you, as always, human girl.”

She punched his shoulder.

“All right! I didn’t know until yesterday. I asked the blue loons at my end of the table while you were admiring Tangaroa’s tattoos.”

“So, Mr Underwater Expert, how often do mermaids come up for air?”

“Never.”

“Never? But they definitely breathe in air, or how else do they breathe out to SPEAK like THIS all the TIME …”

“They have lungs in their chests,” said Yann, “but gills in their necks.”

“That’s why they wear their hair long, even the boys,” added Lavender, “because the gills spoil the smooth line of their necks.”

Helen felt totally out of her depth. “I thought it was a mermaid’s bottom half that was fish, not the top half.”

“They’re far more than half fish,” said Yann. “They’re cold-blooded as well.”

Helen laughed. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

As the sun finally broke through the clouds, and the drizzle stopped, Helen looked at Yann, at the huge bulk of his chestnut horse’s body and the slim boy’s body on top. She wondered if he thought of himself as more than half horse and less than half human.

Catesby squawked, and Lavender said, “They’re about to start.”

Helen, Yann, Lavender and Catesby watched as a tall mermaid lifted a curved shell and blew a booming note.

Tangaroa dived, Rona and Serena slid, all in one moment, into the cold grey water.

Helen saw three long shapes under the surface speed off to the open sea. Soon they were out of sight, swimming too deep for the friends on the cliff to see them.

“We can’t do anything for her now except wait,” said Yann.

“And hope,” added Lavender. “Wait and hope she comes back safe.”