Storm Singing and other Tangled Tasks (8 page)

She watched silver bubbles of air flick off her whiskers as she accelerated through the water. It was always a joy to be back in the sea.

Rona looked to her left, and saw Tangaroa’s dark shape, with knives flashing bright at his ankles and a grin flashing white in his face. He speeded up, so she flicked her back fins and propelled her smooth body well ahead of him.

Serena was swimming deeper, and a few strokes behind. The mermaid was harder to see, because she was further from the sunlit surface waters, and also because it was impossible to see long distances underwater. No matter how bright the sun or clean the water, so many tiny plants and animals lived in Scottish seawater that it was never as clear as air. But visibility this morning was as good as Rona had ever seen it, so she’d certainly notice if either of her rivals tried to get ahead.

She settled into a slight lead over the other two, wondering if they could keep this sprint up for as long as she could. Her whole body was ideally evolved to swim underwater. Serena was half perfect and half awkward in the sea. The mermaid had a stronger tail than Rona, but her heavy human head and poky elbows weren’t
streamlined. Tangaroa’s long limbs were better adapted for running or climbing trees than swimming, but he had strong arms and wide shoulders, and he’d been training for this for years.

Anyway, for Rona, the real challenge wasn’t beating the mermaid and the blue loon, it was beating her fear of the hazards.

The first obstacle was a wreck, which all selkie pups were warned to stay away from. The rock run and tidal race were dangerous too, but at least they were natural.

She was most afraid of the fishing boat. She couldn’t believe her family were encouraging her to get so close to men with nets, knives and possibly guns. Selkies didn’t pay much attention to human politics, but they did know that the people most likely to be given licences to shoot seals were fish farmers and fishermen.

Rona felt her pace slow as soon as she thought about the boat. She forced her fins back to a sprint, and stayed comfortably in the lead.

She remembered Yann advising her to start at the front and stay there, or else stay at the back and make her move at the end. Not let anyone overtake her or she’d feel like a loser. So she’d either made her first winning move, or her first major mistake. She was in the lead. Now, by Yann’s rules, she had to stay in the lead. She had to face the hazards first.

She felt water shift behind her, and glanced back. Tangaroa was surfacing quickly to refill his lungs. She grinned. She’d be able to stay under for much longer without breathing. Tangaroa kept swimming as he leapt up into the air, breaking the sea’s surface like a dolphin, and gasping a chestful of air. He kept his forward motion
going beautifully as he surfaced three or four times. By the time he dived under again, he’d lost only a few body lengths to Serena.

The dive to the wreck was only a few minutes away, so Rona knew she should breathe again now, even though she didn’t feel the burning need for air.

She’d been impressed by Tangaroa’s leaping breath on the move. Seals couldn’t just gulp a chestful of air. They needed to breathe long enough to oxygenate their blood then empty their lungs again, so they weren’t buoyant.

If only she’d taken this race seriously, she could have practised breathing at a sprint like the blue loon.

She angled upwards. Her snout and whiskers broke the bright surface, her nostrils sprang open and she breathed deeply. She kept swimming along the surface, and after three deep breaths, she forced the final outbreath from her lungs, snapped her nostrils shut, changed the angle of her fins and swam back down. Towards the wreck.

She wasn’t in the lead any more. Now she was shoulder to shoulder with Tangaroa.

Where was the mermaid? Still behind, but lower down, so she wasn’t much further from the wreck.

Rona looked at the dark water beneath her, water where almost no sunlight reached.

Then she saw a shadow flick past her, upwards.

She flinched. Shark? Whale? No. It was the blue loon. Having looked at the depth they had to dive, he was going to breathe again.

Rona hesitated. She didn’t want to lose the lead, but she didn’t want to dive to the wreck first either.

Serena didn’t overtake when Rona slowed. Perhaps she was going for the second, sneaky one of Yann’s strategies. Stay back, let others set the pace, then sprint at the end.

Rona wished Yann was here. Or Helen. Or Lavender. She wanted to do this in a team. But this wasn’t an adventure with friends; this was a race against rivals.

So Rona dived.

Her eyes adjusted to the dimmer water. She could see much better in underwater dark with her seal eyes than in overwater dark with her human eyes.

She saw the long fish-like shape of the wreck, the broken propeller lying like a sharp flower on the seabed, the lazy waving of the green and yellow flag which the mermaid judge was shoving in the silt to mark the way into the ship.

Floating above the wreck were two more judges: a selkie she didn’t know and a blue man. All three judges were watching to make sure the contestants swam inside the wreck from stern to bow, rather than using the rusty holes in the deck to escape early; and waiting to rescue the contestants if they got into trouble, then disqualify them immediately.

Rona had never been inside this wreck. Teenage selkies sometimes sneaked in for a dare, and returned with creepy stories of sailors’ bodies floating in the water, white hands reaching out to grab seal fins.

In the bright cave, Rona laughed at these stories. But even if she didn’t believe the descriptions of bony hands and empty eye sockets, she knew that real live predators liked the small spaces of human wrecks. A shark or a killer whale wouldn’t fit in the wreck she was swimming
towards, but an octopus or an eel would be very comfy inside.

It was a big wreck. A long swim with no air. They had to enter by the hole for the propeller shaft at the back of the boat, then find their way through the wreck to emerge at the jagged hole bashed in the front.

She was almost at the flag marking the entrance. Tangaroa and Serena were still behind her.

If she went in first, she’d have to use her eyes, her ears, her whiskers, her sense of direction to find her way through. She’d have to be the trail blazer.

She realised she wanted someone else to go first. She didn’t care if they gained a tactical advantage by overtaking her. Rona suddenly slowed. Serena and Tangaroa both slowed too, staying behind her, perhaps wondering if she’d seen something inside the wreck.

Rona knew if she stopped dead to force someone else to go first, she would look and feel like a coward. So Rona twisted in the water, used all four fins for a burst of acceleration and forced herself through the small round hole into the wreck.

It was suddenly darker, and the water felt wrong: oilier, less alive, as if it didn’t move about as much.

Rona was squashed by the feeling she sometimes got sleeping on Helen’s bottom bunk: stuck in a small unfamiliar space, with corners to bang your head on if you moved too fast, and the suspicion there were monsters under the bed ...

She had to keep going. She pushed through the narrow entrance and found herself in a larger space, where the water tasted even nastier on her lips. A little light was leaking in where the ceiling had collapsed, so
she could see enough anemone-covered machinery to know this was the engine room.

Rona pushed herself forward carefully. She saw a couple of staircases nearby. But she needed to get to the other end of the ship, so she sprinted towards the far end of the room, even though she could barely see it. As she got closer, she could make out the steps of another staircase ahead.

When she glanced back, she could no longer see where she’d come in, because her flicking fins had disturbed rustflakes and silt off the floor. She couldn’t see Serena or Tangaroa either. Was she in here alone?

She peered through the gloom. She caught a glimpse of the mermaid’s red hair, and a little further back, a blue blur. They were all inside the wreck.

Rona sprinted for the wide staircase. She’d never swum up stairs before, but this was easy. Just a push off the bottom step and she glided up a claw’s width above the metal treads.

At the top, she found her way out of the huge engine room, into corridors and smaller rooms.

Rona started to hum inside her head, keeping the beat with her fins as she swam down the middle of a barnacle-encrusted tunnel. The door at the bow end was warped and rusty. She turned round and saw Serena dart in at the stern end of the corridor.

Rona battered her hard swimmer’s body against the closed door. It didn’t budge. She glanced back again. Serena was floating, serenely, at the other end, waiting for Rona to open the door for her. Rona growled, and looked around. There was a half-open hatch above her head. She checked on Serena. The mermaid was too far
away to see the hatch. Rona bit down on a grin, mimed an exaggerated shrug of disappointment, then swam back towards the mermaid. Serena smiled, and turned to go out, to be the first to find another way. As soon as she was out of sight, Rona made a lightning quick turn in the water, and shot up and through the hatch.

Now she was in a long room with a pile of white bones in the corner. The sailors! And their fingers! The pile of bones was at the bow end of the room, so she had to swim towards it. Rona shuddered, her fur twitching all along her spine, and swam very slowly towards the pokey heap.

Was it really a pile of skeletons?

She wanted to close her eyes as she glided over. But she couldn’t help looking down.

It was a pile of chairs. A pile of broken legs, arms and backs. Bent metal tubes covered in white plastic, which nothing alive wanted to stick to. She gulped an airless laugh. All those teenage selkies, scared of some furniture!

She pushed through a swinging door into a tiny kitchen, where a sudden movement made her jerk sideways. A large and angry octopus sprang out of a dark corner. Rona swerved up to the ceiling then dived for the door, getting out of its lair.

She had come up enough floors now. She needed to push forward. She found another corridor and sprinted up it, fins lashing from side to side. She pushed open another door, and was hit by two floppy black rubber suits and a metal tube. Divers’ gear, she thought, as she let them float out of her way. She tried the next door along.
Then she was aware, as she always had to be, of water movement behind her. Was it the octopus from the kitchen coming after her?

No, it was Tangaroa, swimming out of a doorway, joining the corridor halfway up. As she turned another corner, Rona could see the sharp edges of a jagged hole ahead, ripped in the ship by a human bomb, or a rock, or another boat. She didn’t care what had made the hole, she only cared that it was her way out of this nasty rusty box. She glanced round. Serena was behind her too, looking irritated at falling for Rona’s trick earlier on. They had all found the way out.

But Rona was in the lead. She accelerated, as if she was about to snap her jaws on a mackerel, and she shot out of the gap.

As soon as her head and shoulders were in the clear sweet water of the open sea, she saw an unmistakable pattern.

Black and white. Clear black background. Sharp white oval. The markings of ...

Rona twisted in the water and dived straight back into the wreck.

Those were the markings of a killer whale. The only thing every selkie feared more than a fisherman with a gun. Because killer whales hunt and catch and
play
with seals before ripping them to bloody shreds and eating them.

“Killer whale!” she warned Tangaroa and Serena.

Could a killer whale get through the hole? No, she decided, not a fully grown one. So she didn’t flee far. Just a body length away from the open sea.

Tangaroa pushed gently past her and peered out, then turned back to her. He couldn’t speak to her. Human
voices don’t carry underwater, and anyway he’d lose too much air. He must be almost at the limit of his ability to hold his breath.

Rona was about to ask if that air bottle she’d dodged would be any use to him, but the blue loon grinned, raised his eyebrows in amusement, then swam out of the hole and straight towards the killer whale.

Then Serena pushed past her too.

Were they trusting that their human shapes would keep them safe? Rona hoped not, because she’d heard tales of selkies attacked by killers when they were changing from seal to human.

Rona looked out nervously, and saw Serena’s tail flick upwards. Safe. Heading for the next obstacle.

Rona also saw a black and white flag, marking the exit point, waving in the water. Looking nothing like a killer whale, except to very nervous selkies.

She heard mermaid laughter in the clean open sea.

Laughing at her? Because she was scared of a flag? Or because she was now in last place?

Left alone in the sunken ship, Rona wanted to go straight back home. She couldn’t win now. She’d never find the courage to face the other hazards.

She thought about her friends waiting on the ridge, her family waiting on the shore, and realised she was more nervous about going home early, and admitting she’d been frightened of a flag, than she was about the rest of the obstacles. So she swam out of the wreck and followed the mermaid towards the rock run.

She let the rhythm of swimming clear her mind. After a few minutes, she surfaced for another breath. Breathing at a sprint was getting easier with practice.

Rona felt the mood of the sea as she swam. She felt the stillness of the sea, the weight of slack water just hanging there. The tide was about to turn, about to rise. That was the worst time to cross the next obstacle.

The rock run was an oval shelf of rocks: like a small island, but only above the water at low tide. When the tide turned, the water rushed to cover the rocks, so crossing in the next few minutes meant the fast water could drag her off, or crash her into the rocks. But once the tide was high, the rocks would be completely underwater, and quite safe to swim over.

Rona swam at ferocious hunting speed after Tangaroa and Serena, hoping if she proved herself in open water, her mistake in the wreck might be forgotten.

As she finally caught sight of them ahead of her, she felt the tide turn.

She’d tried to explain the turn of the tide to Yann once, saying it was as if all the blood in her veins shifted like a magnet to point the other way, as if twice a day the north pole moved to the other side of the world. It was hard to explain to a land-bound centaur that she
always
knew, without thinking about it, where the tide was. Now she felt it change.

Suddenly in the space of one heartbeat, the tide was going in. The sea was no longer hanging there, waiting. It was rising. Rushing and racing and chasing inland.

They were nearly at the rock run. Rona had almost caught up. She really was faster than the other two in clear water.

Would she be faster over the rocks? Tangaroa, with feet and hands, could run across, and hold on when the waves hit him. Serena also had hands, and if she wanted to waste time and pain changing to human legs she could walk too.

Rona wondered if she should change. Which would be more useful, her human hands to hold herself on, or her seal’s body to protect herself if she was swept off?

She thought about it. There wouldn’t be enough water on the rocks to swim over. As a seal she’d have to haul out and pull herself over sharp stone. Even if she lost a minute at either end changing shape, she’d still be faster on feet than fins.

As she made that decision, all three of them were on the surface, swimming in a tight line towards the rocks.

They could see wild splashes climbing up the rocks, in the sea’s desperate urge to get higher and higher. They saw a selkie judge clinging to the green and yellow flag showing the starting point on the western side. Rona caught a glimpse of the black and white finishing flag on the east side of the obstacle, which looked nothing like the markings of a killer whale out in the open air.

They reached the rocks together. Rona dived underwater, dived out of her sealskin, and surfaced again as a girl. She used her strong bendy fingers to pull herself onto the rocks, then spent a minute folding her skin and tying the flippers into straps so she could wear it on her back.

Rona stood up. Tangaroa was well ahead, running steadily, but as she took her first few steps, ankle-deep in surging water, she saw him being knocked off his feet by a strong wave.

Serena was trying to swim over, flopping from one shallow dip to another. Tangaroa was up again, powering his way forward. But Rona didn’t think he’d chosen the best way. He’d just charged straight across, taking the shortest route.

Instead Rona ran round the southern edge of the rocks. The water was battering into the northern seaward side, but by the time it reached the landward side, the waves had been slowed by the uneven rocks, and were slightly less violent.

This way was longer, though, and it still wasn’t easy. She staggered round the slippery rocks, using her hands to grab the jutting points, gasping as the waves battered into her.

She reached for the next rock, but a wave hit her first. She thrust her hands out and felt the stone graze her thin human skin. She clung on tight, as the water crushed her against the rock. Once the wave had passed, she looked to her left. The mermaid was behind her and the blue loon was ahead, but she didn’t really care any more, she just wanted to be a seal, not a girl on this horrible smashing together of land and sea.

She flung herself forward again.

Then she was knocked over by something more solid than a wave. And she was in the water, sinking as she always did when she had legs. She expected her human body to welcome the sea, to roll and float, but it never did.

She grabbed the water with her awkward hands and kicked with her flimsy legs and dragged herself back to those awful rocks.

What or who had knocked her off? As she pulled herself up, long hair in her eyes, her pathetic human lungs coughing, she saw the answer. Tangaroa was pulling himself up beside her.

“Do you need a hand?” he asked as he stood up.

“No, thanks, I’ve got two of my own at the moment. And legs too.” She grinned at him, leapt up into the knee-high water, and began to run. He was behind her now, following her route round the edge.

She had the hang of it at last. Waiting for the gaps in the surging water. Using the rocks to pull herself along.

She could hear Tangaroa splashing and grunting behind her. Where was the mermaid? Rona glanced back. Serena had changed at last, and was halfway across, long legs shivering in the cold water.

With one last lunge Rona reached the flag, and nodded to the blue man judge, who was indicating the direction of the next obstacle.

Rona could go back in the water now. But not as a girl. She had to waste time changing again. Tangaroa dived in past her, while she stopped to pull the folded skin from her shoulders. She’d tied the knots well. One tug, and the skin opened up. She whirled it round in the spray, and pulled it over her as she dived into the water.

Ah! A seal again.

She always closed her eyes at the moment of change; she didn’t want to see her hands turn into fins. Even with her eyes closed, she could feel her legs and arms getting shorter, her fingers and toes linking and lengthening, her back getting more flexible, her awareness of the smell and taste and feel of the water sharpening.

Now she was back in lovely deep water. But not in the lead. Rona wanted to catch up with Tangaroa, get ahead of him, because for the first time, after that exhilarating crossing of the rocks, she actually wanted to win.

So she sprinted, right up to Tangaroa.

As she overtook him, she heard the sounds of the next obstacle. A noise like claws on wet rock, magnified a thousand times. The screechy scratchy metal sounds of engines, winches, radios, sonar. The fishing boat.

Rona was going as fast as she could towards humans who might be legally entitled to shoot her if they saw her. She wanted to turn back. It would be more sensible, safer, to turn back. But she kept swimming forward until she needed to breathe again. She had breathed a lot as a girl on the rocks, but her human body didn’t store oxygen as effectively as her seal body. She should fill up again.

She swam up to the surface. Tangaroa popped up beside her. He didn’t do his leaping breath. He stopped. So did she. Two dark heads bobbing in the water, looking at the fishing boat a hundred metres ahead of them, its long red hull pointing straight at them.

“Sorry about knocking you off the rocks,” he said. “You might have been in front if I hadn’t. So you can swim along the boat first.”

“That’s very kind of you, to send me in first again!” she snorted. “Are you scared of it too? It’s only seals they shoot, not people.”

He smiled. “Five miles offshore, they’re more likely to think I’m a seal than a boy. It’s not safe for me either.”

“We could go together,” Rona suggested, suddenly feeling the ordeal would be more bearable with a companion.

He looked at her sympathetically. “Scared of doing it on your own?”

She nodded.

He smiled. “I’m not looking forward to it myself.” Then he shook his head. “But I think both of us together would be more dangerous. We’d be more likely to be spotted.”

“We could do it together, but from different ends,” suggested Rona. “One from the bow to the stern, the other from the stern to the bow, then even if they spot us, we might confuse them. Give them two targets instead of one.”

He thought for a moment. “Ok. I’ll swim underwater to the stern, you head slower to the bow. Once we’re both in position, we can swim the length of the hull towards each other.”

Rona took a deep breath. “Why are we putting our lives at risk like this?”

“Because the race isn’t just to test our speed, it’s to test our bravery. The Sea Herald needs to be brave.”

Rona muttered, “Then you’re welcome to the job,” but as Tangaroa was already diving, swimming deep and fast to the other end of the fishing boat, she didn’t think he heard her.

As she got closer, Rona could see the scarred and dirty underside of the boat, and, more dimly, its huge nets hanging low in the water behind it, half full of panicking fish. Why wasn’t it moving forward, trawling for more fish? Perhaps they were about to pull the nets up.

Rona glimpsed three judges floating in a semicircle on the surface, far enough from the boat to be safely invisible.

She was in place now, and she could see the dark shape of Tangaroa at the stern. She flicked a fin, and he waved back.

They both swam to the grey surface, and with heads just above the water, they swam towards each other.

Rona kept her eyes fixed on the boy, trying to ignore the red painted boat to her left. She was concentrating on swimming. Fast, but not so fast that her head rose up high. And she was listening. Not to the sounds of the boat, but to the sounds of the men.

“Time for a cup of tea?”

“Aye, put the kettle on before we pull that lot up.”

It was terrifying to hear the men’s voices so close, but reassuring that they were yelling about cups of tea, not seals and guns.

She was about to reach Tangaroa. He didn’t have his usual stupid grin, and the blue of his skin was almost
invisible in the grey sea. She hoped her fur, dark with water, was as hard to see. They passed each other in the middle of the boat’s length, too nervous to nod, and both swam as fast as possible along the rest of the hull.

The voices were even louder as Rona headed for the stern, where the winding gear was. She wanted to dive, to be safe in the depths of the sea. But the judges were watching her, and Tangaroa was staying on the surface. She had to stay here, in view, in danger.

She was swimming under the ship’s name now: “Sea Quine, Peterhead”. Then she was past the stern, with open sea either side.

She emptied her lungs to dive, and heard a voice yell, “Did you see that?”

But Rona was already diving deep to get down and round the poisonously bright blue nets.

She was shaking with relief, struggling to swim in a straight line, her front flippers out like wings to keep herself steady. She’d done it. She’d swum right beside a fishing boat. Surely nothing else in the Sea Herald contest could be that scary.

She turned round, to convince herself that she had done it, and glimpsed Serena’s silver tail flicking along the surface. The mermaid hadn’t stopped for a chat, and she was now only a couple of minutes behind. So Rona swam forward to keep up with Tangaroa, to try to win this race.

Then, over the screeching and creaking of the boat, she heard a scream.