by Lian Tanner
‘Where are you, Poddy?’ he muttered.
The rats stood on their hind legs, peering at the waves.‘She ain’t got much chance if she’s still out there, shipmate,’ said the fake Adm’ral Cray.
‘She might be all right,’ said Gilly uncertainly.
Sharkey shouted again, at the top of his lungs, ‘Pooooddyyyyy!’
And then he saw her. In the growing light, halfway between Claw and the skimmers. Swimming for her life.
‘Gilly, Cuttle!’ yelled Sharkey. ‘Due west, full speed!’
Gilly dashed below. Sharkey danced from foot to foot, afraid to take his eye off that bobbing head. He felt as if the telling-scope was a rope between them, and if he took it away from his eye, Poddy’d be lost.
‘Hurry!’ he cried.
‘They need a hand down there, shipmate?’ asked the fake adm’ral.
‘Aye!’ said Sharkey.
The rats dashed below again, and a moment later the submersible was underway. Sharkey groaned under his breath, knowing they weren’t going to get there in time. Claw wasn’t made for going fast in the Up Above. She plunged through the waves like a wounded porpoise, up and down, up and down, with Rain clinging to the stay lines. Salt water spattered Sharkey’s face, and he was soaked within seconds. His wounded shoulder throbbed, but he hardly noticed.
Poddy looked so tiny, even through the telling-scope. And the skimmers were so big.
‘They’re nearly on her,’ whispered Sharkey. He groaned aloud as one of the skimmers yawed to the side, its sails dropping. ‘They’ve seen her. No! Poddyyyyy!’
It was no use screaming. It was no use doing anything except watching, right up to the very last moment. Rain ran to the hatch and shouted something, and the motors slowed. Sharkey just watched, his heart almost bursting out of his chest, as his little cousin changed direction, still swimming strongly, still trying to get away from the Ghosts who had spotted her.
There was a bustling along the side of the skimmer, brown robes running hither and thither. Sharkey cursed them, cursed their parents and their grandparents and every single one of their ancestors – if they even had ancestors – right back to the dawn of time.
But it did no good. A sail billowed. The skimmer came around again. A dozen hands threw a net out over the water—
—and hauled it back in, with Poddy inside, kicking and fighting every inch of the way.
In a daze, Sharkey lowered the telling-scope. ‘They’ve got her,’ he said. He felt numb. ‘They’ll be after us next.’
He let Rain go through the hatch first, then he squeezed inside, shut both sets of clamps and half fell down the ladder.
‘Emerg—’ his voice broke. He swallowed and tried again.‘Emergency – deep.’
A muscle in Cuttle’s cheek clenched, but all he said was, ‘Emergency deep. Aye, sir.’
The familiar sequence took over. Out of the corner of Sharkey’s eye, he saw Gilly at the motors and the rats turning the big brass wheels.
The little submersible dived.
Without Poddy.
WITHOUT PODDY
They dived without Poddy.
I should be pleased, thought Rain. One of them has been caught. I should be celebrating.
But she was not. She had grown fond of Claw’s youngest crew member. And besides, ever since the Devouts had sprung their trap, and almost killed her in the process, she had realised that her original plan was not going to work.
In her first dreadful days on the submersible, she had managed to convince herself that if she could only smash its instruments and make the Sunkers surrender, the Devouts would be so pleased with her that they would let her little brother go.
But as the trap was sprung and the arrows fell around her, she had realised that the Devouts didn’t care about her one way or the other. If she captured the Sunkers for them, they would be pleased, but they wouldn’t release Bran. No, if she wanted to save him, she would have to be more devious.
That was why she had dragged Sharkey to safety. That was why she was sitting on the bunk now, watching him and waiting for the right time to say her piece.
She was not the only one watching him. He had taken Claw right down to the deep seabed, where the Devout ships could not find them. He had ordered the motors cut.Then he had slumped on the seat next to Cuttle with his head in his hands.
Now everyone was waiting for him to speak. Even the rats were quiet, though they glanced at each other frequently.
At last Sharkey raised his head and said in a bleak, terrible voice,‘Poddy’s been caught.’
Rain knew guilt when she saw it, and Sharkey was weighed down by it. Something happened up on that deck, she thought. Something that made Poddy swim too far.
But no one was asking, and Sharkey was not telling. Instead, he looked at Rain with his single eye.‘You said the Ghosts don’t really eat people. That the Sunkers’d be taken to a camp.’
This was what Rain had been waiting for.‘Yes.The re-education camp.’
Cuttle blinked. ‘Education? Well, that doesn’t sound so bad, sir, does it? Poddy’s good at her letters.’
‘That’s not the sort of education she’s talkin’ about, shipmate,’ said the rat who called himself Adm’ral Cray.
‘You stay out of this,’ said Sharkey. ‘It’s nothing to do with you.’
Gilly said, ‘But it is, sir! They’re our ancest—’
‘Stop arguing with me!’
A strained silence fell over the little group. Rain listened to the sound of water pressing against the hull, and wondered what would happen if it pressed too hard.
Sharkey rubbed the patch that covered his ruined eye. ‘Tell me about the camp,’ he said.
‘Manners, boy,’ said the rat with the green ribbon.
Sharkey ignored her.
‘It is not really re-education,’ said Rain. ‘It is hard work. Breaking rocks and building roads.’
Cuttle began,‘Poddy doesn’t mind hard w—’
But Sharkey held up his hand.‘Go on.’
Rain gnawed her lip, as if she did not want to answer.Then she said,‘I have not been inside the camp. But my brother is an Initiate, and they are supposed to help watch the prisoners. Bran is only little, and he is a kind-hearted boy. Broth— Brother Thrawn set him to watch the prisoners in the quarry while they broke rocks, and told him that if someone stopped work, even for a moment, he must tell one of the guards. There was an old woman – Bran said she looked sick and hungry. So did the other prisoners, but she looked really sick. And she stopped work, and – and Bran told the guard, because he thought the old woman might be allowed to lie down for a while. Only—’
Sharkey seemed to be having trouble breathing. ‘Only – what?’
‘Whippings,’ said the rat with the green ribbon. ‘Whippings and beatings and all sorts of nastiness, that’s what we saw.’
‘That’s right, shipmate,’ said the rat adm’ral. ‘Before we met up with you, we passed by the Citadel. Took a peek at the quarry while we was there. And I can tell you that the Devouts don’t like folk who stop work.They don’t like anythin’ much, as far as we could tell. Don’t reckon their prisoners last long. Couple of months at the most.’
Gilly flinched. Cuttle stared at his hands.
‘I asked Bro— Brother Thrawn if Bran could stay away from the quarry,’ said Rain. ‘I thought he might be able to just – just study or something.’ She sighed. ‘I should have known better. Broth— Brother Thrawn likes making people do things they do not want to do. He knew I was scared of the balloon – that is why he sent me up in it. And he knew Bran hated the whippings, so he made him watch them.’
There were lies in there, which Rain did her best to make believable. But what she said next was completely honest. ‘I— I am afraid that Bran will get used to it. He is only little, and he wants to be a good Initiate, so he is doing his best not to mind so much. He is doing his best to despise the prisoners, like the Devouts do.’
She stopped he
rself then, though she wanted to keep going, wanted to tell them the real truth. The whole truth. But she must not.There was too much at stake.
Sharkey sat very still, staring at the deck. The only movement came from his shoulders, which jerked several times, as if he was struggling with something inside himself.
Cuttle opened his mouth and shut it again. Gilly watched Sharkey, her own shoulders twitching in unison with his.
When Sharkey looked up at last, there was a light in his eye that Rain had never seen before.‘We have to get her back,’ he whispered.
Cuttle sat up very straight.‘How, sir?’
‘Don’t ask questions,’ said Sharkey.‘I’ll work it out.’
‘What if she’s— What if she’s been eaten already, sir?’
‘The Ghosts didn’t eat Adm’ral Deeps,’ said Sharkey.
Gilly leaned towards him. ‘Maybe the Ghosts haven’t eaten any of ’em. Ma and Fa, and Barnacle. And Blubber and Sprat—’
Sharkey laughed, though there was no humour in it. ‘If they’re alive, we’ll get ’em all back,’ he said recklessly. ‘Why not? The whole lot of ’em.’
‘How will you do it?’ asked rat Lin Lin.
‘None of your business,’ said Sharkey.
‘It might be our business, boy. You might need our help.’
Sharkey shook his head. ‘You heard Rain. She knows about the camp.’
‘But can she slip into it and out again without being seen?’ asked the rat. ‘Can she carry messages? Can she crawl under floors and over rafters and through pipes?’
The reckless gleam in Sharkey’s eye turned to uncertainty, and then to cunning. He stood up, so that he towered over the rat.
‘All right, Great Granmer,’ he said. ‘Let’s make a bargain.’
‘Can you see them?’ whispered Fin.
‘Hang on.’ Petrel wriggled forward and peered through the bracken. ‘Nope. They’re gone.’ She yawned. ‘Just as well too. Don’t reckon I can run any more, not without something to eat. And a bit of sleep.’
The two children had spent the afternoon and most of the night luring the horsemen away from Krill and the silver captain.They’d run, they’d crawled, they’d hidden. They’d scrambled over sharp rocks and through dense thickets, where the horses couldn’t go. They would almost certainly have been caught in more open country. As it was, the growing lameness of one of the horses and the tangled nature of the bushland had worked to the children’s advantage.
Now Petrel was so tired and hungry that she could hardly spit. But she was satisfied, too, as if she had regained a bit of herself that was lost.
‘There’s no one knows how to run and hide as well as me,’ she said to Fin.
He nodded agreement. ‘But they will not give up, you know.They will send a pigeon for reinforcements.’
‘We’ll be back on the Oyster by then,’ said Petrel, ‘eating Krill’s best fish stew.’ She grinned, imagining the deck under her feet.‘With grilled fish for pudding and a nice bowl of fish soup to finish off. Albie’ll be in chains and everything’ll be right again.’
The thought of it made her want to dance. Despite her tiredness, she picked up the telegraph device and jumped to her feet. ‘We’d best get going. We’ve come a long way.’
They didn’t bother retracing the devious back-and-forth path that had brought them there – that would have taken the rest of the day. Instead, Petrel used the sun to guide them in an almost-straight line, with Fin watching out for danger.
They were well underway when the telegraph device began to chatter out another message in general ship code.
Petrel gasped.‘Oh!’
‘What is it?’ asked Fin.
‘Claw’s been delayed.’
‘When will they—’
Petrel held up her hand, still listening. ‘Claw’s cap’n wants a bargain.’ Her voice rose in protest. ‘What? Blizzards, no! He says he’ll only pick us up if we agree to help rescue his people from the Devouts.’
‘We could try.After we get back to the Oyster.’
‘No,’ said Petrel.‘Before he takes us to the Oyster.’
She and Fin looked at each other in dismay.
‘What’ll I tell ’em?’ she whispered. ‘I thought we’d be back where we belong by first watch, or sooner. And Squid and Dolph and everyone else who’s trapped on the bridge’d be safe. But now— Who knows how long this’ll take?’
‘But we have no other way of returning to the ship,’ said Fin.‘Which means—’
‘Which means we ain’t got a choice.’ And, feeling as lost and desolate as she ever had, Petrel began to tap out a reply.
‘They agree,’ said the rat, taking her paw off the comm key. ‘They’ll help get your friends back, and so will the adm’ral and I. And then you’ll take us to our ship.’
‘So where are they?’ asked Sharkey, who didn’t like all these messages going back and forth in a code he didn’t understand.
The rat gave him the coordinates, and he stiffened. ‘But that’s—’
‘That’s what, shipmate?’ asked the fake adm’ral, who was perched on top of the echo sounder.
‘That’s the Sealy Coast,’ said Sharkey, and the air around him seemed to grow colder. ‘Part of the Great Puddle.’
Rain looked from one face to another, her forehead creased. ‘What is the Great Puddle?’
‘It’s a big stretch of shallow water,’ said Gilly. ‘Too shallow for submersibles, except for a couple of
channels, and they’re too narrow. Sunkers never go anywhere near the Great Puddle.’
The rat adm’ral, up on his perch, went very still. ‘You’re not backin’ out of our agreement already, are you, shipmates?’
Cuttle and Gilly began to speak over the top of each other.
‘We can’t go into the Great Puddle—’
‘You know we can’t, Adm’ral, not even for Poddy—’
‘It’s an old rule, never go into the Great Puddle—’
‘It’s too dangerous—’
‘It’s too shallow!’
The rat adm’ral took no notice of them. He was watching Sharkey.
‘They’re right,’ said Sharkey.‘It’d be madness.’
He realised, as he said it, that this was his way out. He’d made that stupid announcement – We’ll get ’em all back – in the heat of the moment, and was already regretting it. Now he could throw his hands in the air and say, ‘Well, we tried. But we can’t go into the Great Puddle.’
Except that wouldn’t save Poddy, would it?
He thought of the re-education camp, with its whippings and beatings. Thought of cheerful little Poddy getting sick and hungry, thought of her dying, all because of a bit of shallow water.
All because of him.
The recklessness took hold again. ‘The Puddle might be too shallow for Rampart,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t mean Claw can’t make it. Cuttle, find me a chart of the Sealy Coast.’
When the chart came, he stared at it, making quick calculations in his head. ‘We’ll need the tide with us. High water’ll be just after eighteen hundred hours down that way.We’d better allow for delays—’
He spun around. ‘Send another message to your friends,’ he said to rat Lin Lin.‘Tell ’em – we’ve got no chance of getting there tonight.Tell ’em we’ll pick ’em up tomorrow night. Seventeen hundred hours – that’s an hour after sunfall.Tell ’em to be ready, we won’t be able to contact ’em again, not till we’re nearly there. If we have to go into the Great Puddle, we’ll use one of the channels, and run as deep and silent as we can. No periscope. No aerial. Nothing. Not till we have to.’
He swung back to Gilly. ‘What’s the charge on the batteries?’
‘Full charge, sir.’
‘Air?’
‘Air’s clean, sir.’
‘Good,’ said Sharkey, though he didn’t feel good. His belly was hollow, as if he hadn’t eaten properly for days, and he could hardly believe he was doing this.
‘Sir,’ whispered Cuttle. ‘Are you sure? The Great Puddle?’
‘Course I’m sure,’ said Sharkey.‘Don’t worry, Cuttle. The batteries are charged, the air’s topped up and we’ve got the ancestors on our side.’ He bared his teeth at the rats. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’
THE GREAT PUDDLE
As the sun rose the next morning, Petrel, Fin, Krill and the captain were tucked up in a rock cave, several feet above the high-tide mark.There was snow on the ground, and the pigeon’s feathers were fluffed out with the cold.
‘I don’t like this,’ said Krill for the hundredth time. ‘We should be going straight back to the Oyster, not wasting our time on someone else’s business. It’s ten days since we left the ship, d’you realise that?’
‘And we still have not found any trace of the Song,’ said the captain.‘Or the Singer.’
‘Cap’n, with all due respect, it’s getting harder and harder for me to worry about a song when my daughter’s trapped on the bridge, along with Dolph and who knows who else! Maybe today’s the day Albie overruns ’em, and what are we doing? Going off to rescue a bunch of strangers!’
‘Who might know the Song,’ said the captain in his sweet, determined voice. He put his hand on the ground and the pigeon clambered onto it. ‘I do not think she wants to go back to the Devouts. I am going to call her Scroll.’
With a sigh, Krill turned his frustration on Petrel and Fin. ‘You should never have agreed to such a bargain, bratlings.’
‘We didn’t have a choice,’ said Petrel. ‘I don’t like it any more than you do, Krill, but we ain’t seen another ship all this time, and you know it.’
‘She is right,’ said Fin. ‘This is our only chance of getting back to the Oyster.’
‘Hmph,’ the Head Cook rumbled deep in his throat. ‘I wish we’d never come north. Our troubles started when we left the ice.’ And he subsided into gloom.
Petrel gazed out at the water, thinking, He’s right. I don’t care about changing the world, not any more. It’s too big and too nasty. I want to go back to the ice.
She felt a brief flicker of guilt over Fin’s mam. He believes she’s dead, she reminded herself. And maybe she is. No point staying in this horrible place for a dead woman.