The Merlin Effect

by T.A. Barron

  Careful to keep clear of the enormous body, Kate brought her kayak nearer to the buoy. She realized, as the whale rolled over, that she had encountered a young male. Big as he was, he had only reached half of his adult size. If, in fact, he ever made it to adulthood. For his plight was clear. His tail flukes were completely tangled in the nylon net attached to the buoy. Wires wrapped tightly, sliced deeply. Blood swirled on the water. The corner of one fluke hung loose, nearly severed.

  Once more the whale flailed, knocking his tail against the instruments, blowing a blast of spray that rained down on Kate. She stowed her paddle and leaned over to the side, nearly swamping the kayak, trying to pull the net off the tail, itself almost as big as her boat. Yet as hard as she tugged, the net would not come free.

  Bracing her hands on the slippery skin, she tried again, pulling with all her strength. No success.

  Her fingers stiff from cold, she reached for one of the two big knots attaching the net to the buoy. At length she succeeded in untying it. Carefully, she pulled herself over to the other knot. It resisted, but finally gave way. As the net slid into the water, she felt a surge of hope. Then she realized that the net connected to the buoy in a third place, at the base of the transmitter dish.

  At that instant, the great tail whipped out of the waves, smacking her hard across her left side. The kayak flipped over, plunging her into icy blackness. She swallowed water, struggling to breathe. Her arms flailed, but she could not pull herself out of the boat. Pain shot through her chest, throbbed in her head. Desperately, she punched at her spray skirt to free herself.

  Suddenly she tasted air again. She gagged, coughing up sea water. The momentum of her roll had flipped the kayak upright, but the boat now rode dangerously low. Her sun hat was gone; her spray skirt was torn. Choking, she rubbed her stinging eyes, as water cascaded down from her hair and shoulders.

  Even as she scolded herself for trying to rescue a whale all by herself, the injured animal abruptly ceased fighting. But for a single quivering fin, he lay motionless in the water.

  She surveyed the young leviathan, lying limp by the buoy. Resignedly, she looked toward shore. The wavering lights of camp seemed to welcome her, offering warmth and safety and dry land. Then the whale stirred, releasing a low, shivery moan, the sound of a living being preparing to die.

  The whale’s eye, as round and silver as the moon itself, met hers. For a long moment, they held each other’s gaze.

  Instinctively, she reached for the transmitter dish where the nylon net connected to the buoy. One of the two rods anchoring the dish to the buoy had already broken. Perhaps . . . She stretched herself farther, farther, waves slapping against the boat and her chest, until at last her hand grasped the remaining rod.

  She hesitated. This equipment belonged to the team. Her father, she knew, was trying to use it, as was Terry. Breaking off the dish might cause some real damage.

  Once more she peered into the silver eye. It watched her intently, not blinking.

  Clenching her teeth, she gave a wrenching tug. The rod snapped, the transmitter dish plunged into the water.

  Several seconds passed. The whale did not move. Then, suddenly, his tail lifted, yanking the net free from the buoy. His massive head bent downward. His flukes, red with blood, arched upward before smacking the water with such force that Kate nearly capsized from the wave. Then he dived into the depths, pulling behind the transmitter dish ensnared in a web of nylon.

  Alone again, she retrieved her paddle. Spotting a flickering light through the mist, she started for shore, feeling exhausted but pleased with herself. Water sloshed inside the kayak, but she could do nothing about that now. A loose object bumped into her leg: her father’s headlamp, stored in the kayak for evening outings. Strapping it on her forehead, she flicked it on, sending a thin white beam across the bow.

  A big wave tumbled over her, soaking her again. Then another. She paddled hard, ignoring the growing ache between her shoulder blades. For some reason, the going seemed more difficult this direction. A tricky bit of current, perhaps, or the added weight of the water she had taken on. Her arms felt weaker with every stroke. Her head hummed.

  At once, she realized the humming was not just in her head. Checking over her shoulder, she saw rising out of the mist a great bulge of water, coursing and crashing under the lamplike moon.

  The whirlpool! The current had dragged her closer! She threw all her effort into every pull of her paddle. But Remolino de la Muerté tugged steadily at her slender craft. Her shoulders throbbed. As she grew more tired, the boat began to slip backward. In no time, she lost what little headway she had gained. Soon the second buoy disappeared into fog.

  Again she stole a glance to the rear. Now the whirlpool jutted out of the sea like a circular tsunami. Spiraling whitecaps curled around its frothy rim, climbing steadily toward the center. Sheets of cold spray rained down on her.

  Terror crowded out her thoughts, growing with the din of the whirlpool. She stroked feverishly, though waves battered the boat and she could no longer see the lights of the camp. Even the moon faded now and then from view, obscured by the rising spray.

  Then, not far ahead, a dark shadow appeared. Slowly, against the swirling mist, the form grew fuller and sharper. Broad at the base and ragged at the top, it lifted above the water as precipitously as an island. But Kate, catching her breath, knew it was no island.

  It was a ship.

  Suddenly, a great wave swept over her, an avalanche of foam, capsizing the kayak. A few seconds later, the small boat drifted back to the surface, floating aimlessly. For now it carried no passenger.

  III: The Horn of Merlin

  Scrambled eggs, coming up,” announced Jim Gordon, trying for the third time to light the burner. “Just got to get this blasted thing to work. Meanwhile, you can finish off that tea in my thermos.”

  He struck another match, then blew gently on the gas outlet while holding the flame as close as possible. With a whooosh, the burner caught fire, just as the match started to singe his fingers.

  “Ow! There now. We’re set.” He straightened his tall, lanky frame, so that his bristly brown hair grazed the ceiling of the boat’s cabin. Planting a heavy cast-iron pan on the sputtering burner, he tossed in a lump of butter. As the smell of sizzling butter filled the cabin, he wiped the mist inside the window with his sleeve, scanned the dark waters outside, then observed the girl in the corner bundled under two wool blankets. Beside her on the floor lay her wet clothes in a pile.

  Kate raised her head, looked into his chocolate brown eyes. “Pretty stupid, huh?” She took a sip from the mug in her hands.

  Her father cocked his head and started cracking eggs into the pan. “No, I wouldn’t say stupid. More like idiotic.” He threw the shells into a trash bin under the steering wheel. “That was a close call for both of us. I try hard never to go out past the second buoy.”

  She listened to the waves lapping at the sides of the Skimmer. “I can see why.”

  “At least you had enough sense to wear your life jacket. And that headlamp. I never would have seen you otherwise.”

  “It was dumb luck, not sense.”

  Turning back to the eggs, Jim began stirring them with an old wooden spoon. “Like them plain? Or my special way, Baja Scramble?”

  “Your way is fine,” mumbled Kate feebly. She swallowed some more tea, her eyes roaming the boat’s interior. The chipping gray paint, the shelves of food supplies, the boxes of diving equipment and spare parts, and the piles of nautical maps gave no hint that this was anything but a normal shrimp trawler. Only the counter by the burner, piled high with computer equipment, discarded printouts, and reference books on sonic imaging, revealed anything different.

  “How come you were out so far in the kayak?”

  “I was just, ah . . . exploring.”

  “Exploring!” Jim stopped stirring. “You could have been killed!”

  She frowned, said nothing.

  “Don’t you know ther
e’s a whirlpool near here? Half a mile wide and probably just as deep?”

  “Sure, but—”

  “Then what ever possessed you to come out so far?”

  “The second buoy.” She paused, on the edge of describing her contact with the whale, then thought better of it. “I wanted to, ah, check it out.”

  Her father scrutinized her, then resumed cooking. “You’ve got to respect the sea, Kate. It’s full of surprises, often deadly. It’s no place to play around. There’s an old saying about this coastline. Mas lejos de la orilla, mas cerca de la muerté. It means Farther from shore . . .”

  “Nearer to death,” she finished grimly. Trying to change the subject, she asked, “So why were you out with the Skimmer? You almost never sail after dark.”

  Jim tasted the eggs, then went back to stirring. “Well, it’s like this. You know how long it’s taken me to get Terry to part with his precious equipment so I could use it to take a sonic picture?”

  “Ever since we got here.”

  “Right. Well, no sooner do I get it all set up and start to shoot the area right under the whirlpool than the screen goes blank. Completely blank! The monitor showed a malfunction at the second buoy, so I hustled out here to check.”

  Kate stiffened. “The second buoy?”

  He glanced her way. “Don’t worry, we’re safe. I’ve got us tied up tight to the buoy. We’ll only stay here a little while longer, so I can do the repairs.”

  Stirring uneasily, she asked, “Repairs?”

  “On the sonar gear.” Pouting, he wiped the spoon on the edge of the pan. “Some damned sea animal decided to get playful with the transmitter dish. Broke it clean off, though I’m sure it’s still there, tangled up in the net someplace.”

  Again she stirred beneath the blankets. “What if the transmitter dish is . . . gone?”

  “Sunk? No chance. I tied those knots myself.”

  “But—”

  “Before I can repair the buoy, though, I need to see if any data got stored before the dish broke off.” Reaching his long arm to the topmost shelf, he steadied himself against the rocking of the waves and pulled down a jar of salsa. As he unscrewed the cap, he nodded toward a black cable stretching from the computer out the door of the cabin. “I’m processing that right now. It’ll take a few minutes. The equipment here on the boat isn’t as powerful as what we have back at camp.”

  Pouring the spicy salsa into the pan, he mixed it with the eggs. “I’m glad you’ve learned your lesson. All my life I’ve been around water, and I’ve never seen anything half as dangerous as this coast. If I didn’t have to come here to find out more about that galleon, believe me, I’d be somewhere else.”

  Feeling he just might be ready to open up to her, Kate decided to save the truth about the transmitter dish for later. She drew in her breath. “What’s so special about that old ship, anyway?”

  Dumping a heap of eggs on a plastic plate, he handed it to her. “There you go, Baja Scramble.”

  “Thanks,” she replied, looking dubiously at the concoction. Suddenly, the aroma aroused her hunger. She took a small bite. “Hey, this is pretty good.” Another bite followed, then another. “Can’t believe how hungry I am.”

  “A swim will do that,” he said wryly.

  “Now can you tell me?”

  He aimed a fork at the eggs in the pan. “Tell you what?”

  “What’s so special about that ship.”

  Glancing at his watch, he said, “Almost time to see what we’ve got. Then a few quick repairs and you’ll be back at camp before you know it.”

  Kate surveyed the cabin, her head swaying to the rhythm of the waves. She sensed she should try a different approach. “Want to hear something crazy? When I first saw your boat, in all that mist, you’ll never guess what I thought it was.”

  “Let me guess. The Navy? The QE II?”

  “No,” she answered. “Even crazier. I thought you were the sunken ship, sailing again like the legend says.”

  “The Resurreccíon?” Jim laughed. “Guess I’ve infected you with my own wild dreams.” He grinned mysteriously. “You never know, though. Myth and reality aren’t always so far apart.”

  “Something you’ve tried to show with Merlin.”

  “That’s right,” he said through a mouthful of eggs. “Merlin’s life and legend are impossibly intertwined. That’s one reason a lot of people still refuse to believe he was a real person.”

  Kate stabbed at the remains on her plate, then asked as casually as she could manage, “Will raising the Resurreccíon help you settle something about Merlin?”

  “You could say that.”

  “But, Dad, we’re in Mexico. Halfway around the world from where Merlin lived! What could he have to do with this place?”

  “More than you know,” he replied, setting down his fork. “But raising the old ship isn’t really necessary. Besides, there’s no way, with this little manpower and time, I could ever hope to do that. Especially with the whirlpool so near. All I need to do is prove the Resurreccíon actually existed. If I can just do that, then . . .”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I can organize a proper expedition to salvage whatever is left of it.”

  “Then what?”

  Jim tugged playfully on her braid. “Then maybe you’ll stop asking so many questions.”

  “I learned that from you.”

  “I see your point. Historians do ask questions for a living. All right, then, here’s one for you. How about some hot cocoa? I think there’s some powdered milk around here someplace.” He took a plastic container from the shelf and set it down with a thud. “Now all we need is the cocoa.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “All right. Tell you what?”

  Straightening her back, she asked, “What could Merlin have to do with the ship? Besides, didn’t he live in the fifth or sixth century? The Resurreccíon went down—”

  “In 1547,” completed her father. “You remember more of the old bedtime stories than I thought. Could it be you’re a fan of Merlin, too?”

  “I hate Merlin,” blustered Kate, surprised at the force of her own words. “He’s just a stupid magician. I couldn’t care less about him. But if I listened to your Merlin stories, I got to see you every once in a while! At least that used to be true before you got all wrapped up with this ship project.”

  Jim turned away and began prying open a canister of cocoa. “That bad, huh?”

  “That bad.”

  Pouring some of the powder into two green mugs on the counter, he went on, “Some father I am. You have to nearly drown yourself to get my attention.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?” She managed a grin. “You used to say the first quality of a historian is resourcefulness.”

  Thoughtfully, Jim mixed some powdered milk in a pot. “Guess I don’t blame you for feeling that way.” He sighed. “Too bad you didn’t like the old stories, though. Telling them to you gave me a chance to work through my theories about Merlin.”

  “Well, I did sort of like the ones when he turned King Arthur into different kinds of animals.”

  “You especially liked the one about Arthur becoming a fish. You made me tell it every night for a month.” He lowered the pot of milk onto the still-sputtering burner, then winked at her. “So I’m not a total failure as a storyteller after all?”

  She eyed him for a moment. “Almost total.”

  “Thanks,” he replied. “Do you, by any chance, remember any of the stories about the Thirteen Treasures?”

  After a long pause, she replied, “The Thirteen Treasures of the Isle of Britain. Merlin had to search for years before he found all of them.”

  “Almost all of them.”

  “Whatever. Then he took them to a secret hiding place called the Glass House.”

  “That’s right. Nobody knows where the Glass House might have been, only that Merlin planned to store the Treasures there until the prophesied return of King Arthur. He believed that
Arthur would need them to win the Final Battle.”

  Jim checked his watch. “Hold on. I’ll be right back.” He stepped to the door, opened it, ducked his head and walked out on the deck. His first stop was the machinery bolted to a metal stand in the middle of the deck; his second, the buoy bobbing just off the stern. The chill, salty air of the sea flooded the cabin, as did the sound of waves sloshing against the boat. And, in the distance, another sound, humming steadily, that made Kate’s stomach clench.

  In a few seconds, he returned and shut the door. “I’ll know pretty soon whether I got any data before the accident. Now . . . where were we?”

  “The Thirteen Treasures.”

  “Right.” He gave the milk a stir, then asked, “Can you remember which was the one Treasure Merlin wanted most? The one he thought was more powerful than all the others combined?”

  Kate’s brow furrowed, as she listened to the kerslap, kerslap of the waves on the hull. “It wasn’t . . . the sword of light. Or the cauldron of knowledge. Or the knife that could heal any wound.” Her eyes roamed the cabin, coming to rest on the pair of green mugs. “I remember! The thirteenth Treasure. The magical drinking horn.”

  His gaze seemed to peer right through her. “The Horn of Merlin.”

  “But what does all this have to do with the ship?”

  “Everything.” Sliding into his chair, he leaned back and said, “In all the years I’ve been studying Merlin, no element of the legend has been more fascinating—or frustrating—than the Horn. It’s kept me awake for more nights than I can remember. The trail has led me to Cornwall, Normandy, Iceland, Italy, Spain, and now here. And with very little to show for it. Until recently.”

  He doused his finger in the pot of milk. Shaking his wet finger, he declared, “As it is, I still don’t know much. But what I do know is . . . intriguing.

  “The story of the Horn has two parts. The first part begins long before Merlin ever found the Horn, in a forgotten land called the place where the sea begins. It concerns a legendary craftsman, Emrys, his love for someone named Wintonwy, and the origin of the thirteenth Treasure. The second part is even more mysterious—the part that concerns the whirlpool and a certain Spanish ship.”