Tide Knot

by Helen Dunmore

  Sometimes, between dreams, I remembered the whale. I never thought about Dad or the reason we’d come to Ingo. Each time I woke up and then drifted back into sleep, the dreams grew more enchanting. Each time the waking world grew more shadowy. Why wake at all? Why go back there when the current offered everything I had ever wanted…?

  Ding-dong bell, ding-dong bell,

  Ding-dong…

  The voices chimed more sweetly than any human voice I’d ever heard. Going away would be easy if it meant going to join those voices. I would leave everything to follow them…leave everything—

  “Sapphire! Sapphire! Sapphire!”

  A voice was saying the same word, over and over. I listened dreamily. After a long time I remembered what the word meant. It was my name. I was Sapphire.

  “Sapphire! Sapphire! Sapphire!”

  Why did the voice sound so sharp and urgent? Why was it trying to wake me up? All that mattered was the dream. Nothing must break the dream. I would rather stop being Sapphire than break the dream.

  “Sapphire!”

  The voice would not leave me alone. It was an echo booming in a cave. It was a bee buzzing in my ear. I twisted in the current, trying to close my ears—

  And then something caught hold of me. Something grabbed me by the arms and hauled me out of the current. Something tore me away from the dream, and it shattered into a million brilliant drops, like drops of water, as I was pulled back into the world.

  “She’s awake.”

  Someone is bending over me. A face I know I ought to know.

  “Saph! Don’t you recognize me?”

  I stare at the face. Brown skin, dark eyes, dark hair. The face is peering at me anxiously. “You’re—yes, I know you. Your name is Conor.”

  “Saph! Why are you talking like that? It’s me. Conor. Your brother, Saph. Wake up!”

  “Leave her,” says another voice, much deeper. I know this voice at once. It’s the one that called my name and made me lose my dream.

  “Why did you do it!” I exclaim angrily. “I was so happy, and you destroyed it.”

  “It would have destroyed you.” The deep, rich voice goes on. Another figure is leaning over me now. His hair is threaded with white, his eyes are green and silver. He looks as old as the world, but his face is unwrinkled. Is he young or is he old? His tail is like a seal’s tail dipped in frost.

  “She looks so ill,” says the one I recognize as my brother. “What do you think happened to her, Saldowr?”

  At the sound of his name, a shudder runs through me. Saldowr. It is all flooding back, and I want to build a dam to keep out the knowledge. It was so peaceful in the current, so beautiful. Why did they pull me out of it? Saldowr. You must go to Saldowr and find your answer, whatever pain it causes.

  “She has been in the Deep,” says Saldowr. “She has survived the Deep, which no human child or Mer child should survive. It has not crushed her body, but it has crushed her heart. It left her weak and empty, and the current knew it. It filled her with its false dreams. I hope that we have caught her in time, before the dreams took her so far away that she could never return.”

  “Were you really in the Deep, Saph?” My brother’s face bends over me. He looks worn and anxious. There are black hollows under his eyes.

  “Yes,” I say calmly. “But you don’t need to worry. I was perfectly safe.”

  Conor’s face twists. How strange he looks! “What’s the matter with you?” I ask.

  “He’s weeping,” says Saldowr. “It’s something humans do. He has been watching and waiting, hoping against hope that you had survived the Deep. He has not eaten. He has not rested for a moment.”

  I stare at my brother. Something niggles at my mind. Something is different, unexpected—

  “Why, Conor! You’re not holding on to Faro.”

  “He is with me within the Groves of Aleph, within my protection,” answers Saldowr. “He does not need any other help.”

  “So where is Faro?”

  “Saph, stop it! Stop asking all these questions as if they’re mathematics puzzles! Don’t you care what’s happened to him?”

  “Care what happened to him…That’s why I asked.”

  Conor’s looking at me as if I scare him. “But that’s not the same thing, Saph. Don’t you see?”

  “Give her time,” says Saldowr. “In your world, when a person has been lost in the snow and her feet and hands are half frozen, you don’t bring her in to sit close by the fire. Your sister has been in the Deep, where life and feeling are pressed as thin as a sheet of paper. Let her come back to us slowly.”

  He turns to me. “Faro is well. He is resting. He brought your brother to me.”

  “He did much more than that, Saph! Faro took a terrible risk. After he’d got me safe to Saldowr, he tried to dive into the Deep to find you. He’s lucky to be alive. He blacked out from the pressure, and Saldowr’s been treating him ever since. Don’t you understand, we’ve been desperate, thinking you were dead?”

  “I wasn’t dead. I was still in Ingo.”

  Saldowr is watching me closely. “Part Mer, part human,” he murmurs. “The mixture is potent but unstable…. You were still in Ingo, you say?”

  “That’s what the whale told me. She said, How could it not be Ingo where I am?”

  “Say those words again,” demands Saldowr.

  “How could it not be Ingo where I am?”

  There is a long silence. Why are they staring at me like that? Saldowr so intent and somber, Conor so strange, his face struggling. He’s weeping. It’s something humans do.

  But I’m human. Why did Saldowr talk as if I wasn’t?

  “Saph, what have they done to you?” asks Conor despairingly. “You’ve changed. You’re not yourself anymore.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Leave her, Conor. She must rest. She must come back to herself slowly.”

  For the first time I look around and take in my surroundings. I am lying on a bed of soft sea moss, like the bed in the dream. We are in a grove of underwater trees, as thick as oaks. Their trunks are knotted, shiny, and reddish brown, with roots rising like knuckles above the pale sand. Over our heads, thick branches sway in the water. We are no more than thirty meters below the surface, but the trees hide us.

  “Watch your sister, Conor,” says Saldowr, and he swims away into the thickest part of the grove, where a dozen trunks are twisted together.

  “That’s where he lives,” murmurs Conor to me. “His cave is among those trees. Faro is there, for healing, but we can’t enter because our Mer blood isn’t strong enough.”

  Conor’s words lap at my ears. I know I should concentrate on what he’s saying. From his expression I can see that it’s important, but I can’t focus on Conor or Saldowr or anything else. If I do, I might never hear those singing voices again. I’m sure they are still singing somewhere, just out of earshot. If only I could find that current again and lay my head on its pillow and let it carry me away—

  “Saph!”

  Conor bends over me, his face drawn with the pain that Saldowr said was a human thing. Weeping seems strange to me. Human things seem very far away now. “Saph,” Conor pleads, “come back, before it’s too late!”

  Something gathers at the corner of his eyes. Water. All the water in Ingo is salt, but this is not ordinary salt water. It does not blend into the waters of Ingo and lose itself there. A drop glistens as it rolls down Conor’s cheek. He leans close to me, and the drop falls. It remains as separate as a drop of mercury as it falls through the water and onto my forehead.

  The tear tingles as it touches my skin. The tingling spreads outward. It hurts, like pins and needles in a foot that’s gone to sleep. I screw up my face in pain. What I see hurts me. What I hear hurts me. The enchanting curtain that the current drew between me and the world has been ripped down. But there’s my brother. Suddenly I remember how terrified I was down in the Deep when I thought I might never see him again. Conor
has survived. We are back together, both of us alive against all the odds.

  “Conor!”

  “Saph!”

  “Conor, what happened to you? How did you get that cut on your forehead?”

  “Saph!” He grabs my hands and squeezes them in his. “You’re back! It’s you!”

  “Conor, I feel so weird. I feel as if I’m waking up from a dream. Is it really you?”

  “Of course it’s me, you idiot! Who else would it be?”

  We can’t stop smiling stupidly at each other. We can’t let go of each other’s hands. Everything is so sharp and bright that it makes me blink. I can hardly take in what’s happening.

  “You were weird,” Conor says. “It was like someone had put a spell over you. Horrible.” He shivers. “As if you were here in your body but absent in your mind.”

  “I don’t know what happened to me. I knew things, but I couldn’t feel them. It was like looking at you through thick glass. But are you hurt? What’s been happening?”

  “It’s a long story, Saph.”

  We sit side by side on the bed of sea moss, Conor’s arm round my shoulders, while he tells me everything. How they watched the current sweep me away and struggled to reach me, but in a few seconds I had disappeared. They were tossed over and over, battered by the water, battered against each other, but the current didn’t swallow them.

  “It was like being chewed up in a monster’s mouth,” says Conor. All he could do was cling to Faro, and Faro never let go of him. They were both covered in cuts and bruises, but at last they got out of the current. They must have been closer to its edge than I was, and Faro had the power of his seal tail to drive them through the water.

  “But I still don’t think we’d have escaped on our own. I think the current didn’t want us. It spat us out.”

  Once they were out of the current, there was no choice. Faro wanted to dive to find me—Conor realized that later—but he couldn’t until he’d got Conor to safety. The only sure place was where Saldowr was, in the Groves of Aleph. By the time they reached the Groves, they were both exhausted, but Faro wouldn’t give up. He handed Conor over to Saldowr; then, before they realized what he intended, he swam back and tried to enter the Deep.

  “It was an incredibly brave thing to do. The Mer can’t survive in the Deep, and he knew it. The Deep was too powerful for him, and it threw him back. He was unconscious, and Saldowr revived him. I don’t really know about that part because I was out of it too. Faro’s recovering now, Saldowr says. I haven’t seen him yet.”

  “Does he know I’m alive?”

  “Yes. Saldowr told him.”

  So this is where we are, the Groves of Aleph. It’s like an underwater forest. The trees are thick and close together, as if they’ve crowded up to protect whatever lies in the heart of them. I wish I could see Faro now. He risked his life going into the Deep for me. He must have thought he’d failed and I was dead.

  The Deep should have killed me, but it didn’t. The whale didn’t expect to see one of my kind there. Mer can’t survive there, and nor can humans. I know that I am part Mer and part human, so I don’t understand why I’m still alive. It’s making my head hurt to think about it all.

  “Conor.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are really here, aren’t you?”

  Conor squeezes my hand, hard. “Does that feel real enough?”

  “Yes, get off, you’re hurting—But Conor, it was so scary being alone down there. I’d have died without the whale.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She looked after me. It’s strange—isn’t it, Con?—human beings have been killing whales for hundreds of years, and yet she helped me to get out of the Deep. I’d never have done it without her. She was like a—a bit like a mother—”

  We stare at each other in consternation. Mum! I had completely forgotten about her.

  “How long do you think we’ve been in Ingo?”

  “I don’t know. Not too long, I hope.”

  “Mum’ll be so worried—”

  “We couldn’t have done anything else. I couldn’t have left Ingo without you.”

  “Maybe we should leave now, Con.”

  But Conor is resolute. “No. Not before we’ve asked Saldowr about Dad. Not after we’ve come all this way.”

  By the time Saldowr returns, we are sitting silently, pondering everything that has happened. Saldowr is carrying something, fruit that look a little like grapes, except that they are flatter. They are a rich dark turquoise. “I brought these for your sister, to help her to return to us,” he says to Conor, “but it seems that it’s not necessary. The Deep has released her already. All the same, you must both be hungry. Eat.”

  I’ve never thought of being hungry in Ingo before. I’ve never even wondered about what the Mer eat or drink. Conor looks cautiously at the sea grapes. “I’m all right, thank you,” he says politely.

  Saldowr smiles as if he knows exactly what Conor’s thinking. “They are quite safe to eat,” he says.

  I reach out, take a grape, and put it in my mouth. The skin bursts, spilling juice. It tastes so good that I take another and then another, greedily, until half the bunch is gone. “Conor, I’m eating them all. You have your share.”

  “I’m really not hungry, Saph.”

  “You like our fruit, child,” says Saldowr to me. “How do the grapes taste to you—salt or sweet?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t taste salt or sweet to me. They’re just right.”

  “Then eat them, myrgh kerenza.”

  My hand is reaching out to pick another grape from the bunch, but at Saldowr’s words it freezes. “Why did you say that?”

  “Because you know what it means.”

  Myrgh kerenza. Dear daughter.

  “But you’re not my father.”

  “My child, you must understand that you are not just your father’s daughter. You are a daughter of Ingo. You have a purpose here, with us.”

  “Saph, what’s going on? What’s he saying?” asks Conor.

  Saldowr touches him lightly on the shoulder. “Your sister is speaking full Mer to me now. I am telling her that she has a purpose in Ingo. But we shall go back to speaking the common language. Understand this, Conor, it is neither a strength nor a weakness in your sister that she is as she is. She did not choose it; it chose her. She is part Mer and part human; you are both that. But in her, Mer and human are strangely and powerfully fused. She has gone to the Deep and returned alive.”

  “You’re just like Granny Carne!” exclaims Conor, staring at him.

  “Who is Granny Carne?” asks Saldowr.

  “A wise woman.”

  “Saldowr isn’t at all like Granny Carne, Conor, he’s the complete opposite. She’s Earth—”

  “Yes, I know, but Saldowr is to the Mer what Granny Carne is to humans,” says Conor impatiently. “She belongs to Earth, and he belongs to Ingo, but they’re like two sides of the same thing.”

  Saldowr is watching Conor closely, as if he wants him to say more.

  “Do people—Mer, I mean—do they come to you when they have troubles—when they want to know what to do?” goes on Conor eagerly. Saldowr nods.

  “I told you, Saph! They are doing the same thing, but in different—what’s the word?—elements.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about me,” observes Saldowr dryly. “Those who come to me usually come with questions, not answers.”

  Conor flushes. “We have come with a question,” he says.

  “Then ask it.”

  But Conor turns away. His fists are clenched. “In a moment,” he says in a stifled voice. I’m sure that Saldowr already knows our question. Conor is right: They would recognize each other, even though he is not the same as Granny Carne. I raise my head and meet Saldowr’s eyes.

  “Our father is in Ingo,” says Conor slowly, “and we think—we believe that he is unhappy here. We believe that he made a choice without knowing what he was doing. It wasn
’t a free choice if he didn’t understand it, was it? We want to know if that choice can ever be…changed.”

  “You want him to return to you,” says Saldowr sternly. His green and silver eyes flash as he draws himself up to his full height. “You think that he can return to the Air, just as your sister returned from the Deep.” He frowns and looks from one of us to the other. “It will take more than human tears to restore your father to you. Are you truly ready to know what has happened to him? Are you ready to know what choice he made?”

  I can’t speak. Conor answers quietly but steadily, “We are ready.”

  “A true answer can cut like coral,” warns Saldowr. “But if you want to know more, come with me now.”

  Without a backward glance to see if we are following or not, Saldowr swims away, toward the heart of the Groves.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We halt in the thickest part of the trees, not far from the cave. Its entrance is hidden by a curtain of silvery weed that sways gently to and fro. I wish I could go into the cave and thank Faro for what he did, diving into the Deep like that, risking his own life to help me. I feel a rush of gratitude and a shiver of fear for what could have happened to Faro and to me too. I’ve got to thank him.

  As if Saldowr has caught my thought, he shakes his head. “Wait here,” he says, and then dives through the curtain of weed.

  We wait. The light glows a soft, deep red as it filters through the dense branches above us. The rocks around the cave entrance glisten with mother-of-pearl. The sand is silver. It’s beautiful here in the heart of the Groves of Aleph, but it’s not a peaceful sort of beauty. It makes me tingle with anticipation. Something’s going to happen, or maybe it’s already happening, only we can’t see it.

  Suddenly Conor nudges my arm. “Look up,” he whispers. “Look up between the branches.”