The Land of Roar

by Jenny McLachlan

  ‘No. Just . . . gone.’ He shrugs. ‘Like the unicorns and half of the merfolk. I reckon she’s vanished.’

  Rose puts down the bottle she’s holding. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s like I told Arthur,’ says Win. ‘Things have been disappearing. It happened around the same time the ground wobbles started and the sinkholes opened up.’

  ‘Maybe they went to the Tangled Forest,’ says Rose. ‘It’s huge. Loads of things could go in there and never be seen again.’

  Win shakes his head. ‘Once I thought I saw it happen, right in front of my eyes. I was down on the beach and a mermaid was jumping over a wave. I watched her fly up in the air, and then . . . she just vanished.’

  Rose turns and goes over to the mantelpiece. It’s covered in white shells, a horse made out of driftwood, a bracelet and a dried-up flower. Rose stares at the shells and I see that they aren’t randomly scattered like I thought. In fact, they spell out ‘ROSE’. Rose stares and stares, then swipes her hand through the shells, sending them tinkling to the floor.

  ‘Mermaids move fast,’ she says. ‘You know that. That one you saw, she can’t have vanished. You weren’t looking properly!’ Rose’s voice is raised. Just like me, she gets angry when she’s upset. She glares at us both.

  ‘Maybe,’ says Win, ‘but I was just over at the lagoon and I can only see one mermaid in there. It used to be full of them. Where’ve they gone?’

  Rose turns and bangs out of the hut and Win and I watch her go. She walks to the end of the deck and stands, arms folded, staring across the lagoon.

  Win picks up Mitch’s spell book and flicks through it. Then he says, ‘I think now Mitch has gone I might miss her too.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ I look around the abandoned room. I may have spent more time in Win’s cave than Mitch’s hut, but now I’m here I can remember how this place used to be full of smoke, and the smell of herbs and spices, and the sound of Mitch’s laughter. The cauldron would be bubbling and Mitch would be sitting with her tail dangling in the hole, her blue hair coiled around her.

  If Win was made up of things I loved, then Mitch was made up of things Rose loved: magic, the sea, and laughing at me and Win.

  ‘I’d better check if Rose is all right,’ I say and I walk out of the hut.

  Rose is standing by a hammock tied to the branches of a willow tree. She pushes the hammock with one finger.

  ‘I’m not bothered,’ she says before I’ve said a word. ‘Mitch was cool, but she wasn’t real. Not like my friends back home.’ The water in the lagoon bubbles and ripples for a moment before becoming still again.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ I say. ‘Maybe she is in the Tangled Forest.’

  Rose shakes her head. ‘No . . . she loved it here.’

  Looking around, I can see why. It’s silent and beautiful. Mitch used to get annoyed with a lot of things – especially me and Win – but there’s nothing to annoy her here.

  Rose turns away from me and I notice that her shoulders are shaking. I wonder if she’s crying, only Rose never cries. Once a log tied to a rope swing smacked her in the face and broke her nose and she still didn’t cry . . . I did – there was so much blood.

  I’m just considering putting my hand on Rose’s shoulder – although I’m almost certain it will drive her mad – when I hear heavy breathing behind me. I turn and see Prosecco walking towards us. He’s soaking wet. His glittering mane hangs in limp strands around his shoulders and water drips from his body. He must have swum between the islands of the Archie Playgo to get to Rose.

  He nudges past me and dips his heavy head until it’s resting against Rose’s cheek. She turns, and without saying a word throws her arms round his neck and buries her face in his sopping mane.

  Then they just stand there, Rose’s arms squeezing tight, Prosecco’s eyes closed, and the willow branches brushing the water.

  Rose looks up at me. ‘We’re going to go back to the Crow’s Nest,’ she says. ‘We’re going to get Grandad and take him home.’

  ‘You really think we can do it?’

  ‘Of course we can.’ Then she grips Prosecco’s mane and pulls herself on to his back. ‘I’m going to come up with a plan.’

  Prosecco jumps past me, nearly knocking me into the lagoon, then gallops off across the island with Rose clinging to his back. His thundering hooves make the dragons rise up in the sky, and I watch as they circle the island, once, twice, then soar off over the sea.

  When Rose gets back Win and I have mended the door and started to make dinner.

  Win found roots, leaves and mushrooms in Mitch’s garden and together we chopped them up and put them in the cauldron. Rose inspects the thick, murky soup. ‘Smells surprisingly OK,’ she says. Then she walks around the room, pulling open drawers and rummaging through cupboards. Eventually she rips some pages from the back of the spell book, finds a pen, and starts writing. She draws diagrams, creates lists and covers the pages with doodles and arrows. Presumably this is her plan to get Grandad out of the Crow’s Nest. I only speak to her when I take the map out of my pocket and hand it over. ‘This might help,’ I say.

  ‘Thank you,’ she mutters, then I leave her to it and help Win sort Mitch’s potions into two piles: Deadly Poisonous and Not Deadly Poisonous.

  Dinner is almost ready when Rose tells us she needs our help. ‘That thing you were on. That line of rocks.’

  ‘The Magic Road,’ says Win.

  ‘I think you mean the Obstacle Course of Death,’ I say.

  Rose shakes her head with frustration and passes us the map. ‘Whatever. I want you to add it on here. From Pickle’s back I could see that it was long, but it was broken in some places and the rocks looked like they were all different shapes and sizes. I want to know exactly where everything is, especially the big boulders.’

  So Win and I get to work, leaving Rose to season the soup with generous dashes of potions from the Not Deadly Poisonous pile.

  I have to trust Win to do the part of the Magic Road he travelled along without me, and there’s a bit at the end that is a mystery to both of us, but by the time Rose is dishing up the soup we’re pretty pleased with what we’ve done.

  We eat our strange soup sitting at the end of the jetty, our feet dangling in the lagoon. I take a sip. It might be purple and fizzing, but it tastes delicious. Maybe that’s because we’re so hungry. As we eat we watch the setting sun turn the water orange, then yellow and finally a deep, dark blue. It’s beautiful, but it’s hard to enjoy it knowing that Grandad is trapped deep in the dungeons of the Crow’s Nest.

  Rose must be having similar thoughts, because suddenly she bangs down her bowl. She’s wearing the bracelet that was on the mantelpiece and the shells and sea glass catch the last of the evening light. ‘Right,’ she says, ‘let’s talk about the plan.’ She clears her throat and pulls out her notes and our map. ‘The three of us can’t get into the Crow’s Nest from the Magic Road because, well, you saw what happened, so we need another way in.’

  ‘The Crow’s Nest is in the middle of the wildest ocean in Roar,’ I say. ‘There is no other way in.’

  ‘Yes there is,’ interrupts Rose. ‘Remember the time Crowky fished Mitch out of the sea in a net and took her to the Crow’s Nest in the Raven ?’

  ‘Yes!’ cries Win. ‘She escaped by jumping from a tower.’

  I nod, the story coming back to me. In fact, I think we were sitting right here when Mitch told us about it.

  ‘So there’s a tunnel that leads right inside the Crow’s Nest from the sea,’ says Rose, ‘and we’re going to fly into it on the dragons.’

  ‘We? ’ I say. ‘Win and I don’t fly dragons, Rose, or even sit on them. That’s your job, remember? We just admire them . . . from a distance.’

  ‘Well, you’re going to have to learn how to fly them because three of us, plus Grandad, will be too many to sit on one dragon. I’ll fly Pickle and you two will fly Vlad. Bad Dragon is much bigger. If she was around, we could u
se her.’

  ‘No we couldn’t,’ says Win. ‘Bad Dragon is vicious!’

  ‘But she was never really bad,’ protests Rose. ‘The only reason she was called “Bad Dragon” was because she was so cheeky and I was always having to say stuff like, “Spit out that furry, bad dragon!”’

  ‘Now she lives up to her name,’ says Win. ‘She’s bad to the core . . . or was before she disappeared.’

  Rose absorbs this information, then nods. ‘So we forget about Bad Dragon and fly Vlad and Pickle into the cave, and while Crowky and his scarecrows are being distracted, we climb up into the castle, grab Grandad and fly out of there.’

  ‘Hang on . . . who’s distracting Crowky?’ I say. ‘Because that is one job I would not like to have.’

  Rose’s eyes light up. ‘The Lost Girls.’

  ‘The Lost Girls? ’ Win sucks in his breath. ‘Are you serious ? They’re savage!’

  The Lost Girls are shadowy in my memory, but perhaps that’s because they liked to hide. They were a gang of ferocious little girls who had a camp of tree houses deep in the Tangled Forest. They were unpredictable, but there were a lot of them . . . I think back to how quickly Win and I were overwhelmed by the scarecrow army. ‘Rose is right,’ I say. ‘We need the Lost Girls. But how will we get them to the Crow’s Nest? We can’t fit them all on the dragons.’

  Rose points at the bit Win and I added to the map. ‘They’re going to get there on the Magic Road. There are loads of them so they’ll be able to fight the scarecrows and keep them away from us.’ She looks from me to Win. ‘So it’s decided? Tomorrow we go to the Tangled Forest, find the Lost Girls and persuade them to help us. Then you two can learn how to fly a dragon.’

  I nod, trying to ignore the various gaping holes in Rose’s plan, like the ‘persuade them to help us’ bit, and the ‘you two can learn how to fly a dragon’ bit.

  ‘What could go wrong?’ cries Win, and in his excitement he jumps to his feet and throws himself into the lagoon with a cry of, ‘Ninja bomb!’ He splutters to the surface. ‘Water’s perfect. Come in!’

  Rose is adamant that she’s not getting wet so while she swings in Mitch’s hammock I jump in too (only I take my jeans off first) and together we swim to the centre of the lagoon.

  He’s right: the water is perfect.

  We float on our backs and we watch as the last rays of sun disappear and the stars come out.

  Tomorrow I have to venture into a forest that’s hiding a gang of violent little girls and learn how to ride a dragon, but right now my skin is changing from red to blue to purple as the stars shine down on me, and a mermaid is swimming around us, occasionally knocking my feet with her tail.

  ‘I’m glad you came back, Arthur,’ says Win, breaking the silence.

  ‘Me too,’ I reply.

  We set off for the Tangled Forest at dawn.

  Rose wants us to fly there on the dragons, but Win’s persuaded us to go looking for Mitch’s rowing boat. Apparently there’s a river that runs right into the Tangled Forest, so we trudge across the island hoping Mitch’s boat is still moored in its usual spot.

  ‘I don’t get why Mitch even needs a boat,’ I say.

  Rose sighs. ‘She’s not just a mermaid, Arthur. She uses it when she’s collecting ingredients for spells.’

  ‘But how does she even get to it?’ Mitch could move about on land, by wriggling like a seal, but she didn’t like doing it and I can’t imagine her regularly crossing this prickly meadow of grass and sea thistles.

  ‘There’s a tunnel that runs from the sea right into her store cupboard,’ says Rose, then she scowls and mutters, ‘Or something like that.’

  She’s been like this since we woke up: trying hard to show she’s not into Roar. When we find the crack cutting across the middle of the meadow, wider than I’ve seen it anywhere else, she just steps over it like she’s stepping over a puddle.

  ‘Look, Rose.’ I peer into the darkness. ‘This crack runs all over Roar!’

  She rolls her eyes. ‘It’s just a crack, Arthur.’

  ‘It came two weeks and two days ago,’ says Win. ‘I know because it was your birthday and to celebrate I’d taken some cake up to the waterfall. Just as the sun was setting there was this massive earth wobble and the crack appeared. The next day I followed it through the forest and over the dunes until it disappeared into the sea.’

  ‘Me and Arthur had a massive fight that day,’ says Rose, then she marches forward, calling over her shoulder, ‘Hurry up!’

  We find Mitch’s boat pulled up on a pebbly beach. From here we can see the Archie Playgo spread out in front of us, each island glowing in the early morning light. But Rose barely glances at it. Instead she grabs the front of the boat and starts heaving it towards the water. ‘Help me, Arthur,’ she snaps. ‘The sooner we get to the Tangled Forest, the sooner we can get Grandad and get out of here.’

  That’s another thing she’s doing: ignoring Win and acting like he isn’t here.

  Win doesn’t seem to care. He just grabs the other end of the boat and starts pushing. Mitch’s boat is a normal wooden rowing boat, but with jars crammed under the seats and in every corner. Lots of them still contain ingredients Mitch collected, and as we push the boat into the water glowing ferns and wriggling blobs swish around in the jars.

  The moment the boat’s afloat, we jump in and Rose and I take the oars. We’ve barely left the island behind us when Rose starts complaining. ‘You’ve got to row faster, Arthur, or we’ll never make it to the Tangled Forest!’

  ‘You row faster!’ I say, but secretly I’m wondering if she’s right. We don’t seem to be making much progress.

  ‘We need a bit of help, that’s all,’ says Win. ‘Give me your watch, Arthur.’ I hand him my Casio and he leans over the side of the boat and starts splashing it about in the water. ‘Come and get it!’ he calls. ‘Arthur Trout’s lovely watch!’

  ‘Win, what are you doing? It’s water-resistant not waterproof !’ My words die away as a dark brown hand slips out of the water. Webbed fingers snatch my watch then disappear again.

  A second later the head of a merboy appears. He has shell-encrusted skin, weed tangled in his hair, and his chest and shoulders are covered in intricate tattoos. He looks at us, one at a time, his jet-black eyes lingering on me and Rose. The gills at the side of his neck open and close with a wet slurping sound. Then he says something that sounds a bit like, ‘Feesh meester splish?’

  ‘Well, go on, Rose,’ says Win. ‘Ask him.’

  Rose looks at Win properly for the first time today. ‘Ask him what?’

  ‘To pull the boat.’

  She gives an exasperated laugh. ‘How can I ask him that? I don’t speak Mermish, or whatever weird language he was speaking in.’

  ‘Yes, you do!’ says Win encouragingly. ‘You’re fluent.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’ Then Rose presses her lips together as if she’s scared a few words of Mermish might pop out.

  ‘Fine. Keep rowing then,’ says Win, and he lies back on the bench, kicks off his trainers and dangles his bare feet over the side of the boat.

  ‘Just try, Rose,’ I say. ‘The minute I arrived in Roar loads of stuff came back to me. Maybe it’s the same with you and . . . Mermish.’

  ‘Fine!’ Rose scowls at me, then moves closer to the merboy and starts whispering to him using lots of ishy-wishy words. It sounds just like one of the pretend languages we used to make up when we were little, but it can’t be nonsense because the merboy is nodding his head and whispering back to her.

  Suddenly Rose turns to me. ‘Arthur, give me your socks.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He wants your socks. I don’t know why.’

  ‘But he’s not got feet!’

  ‘Look, do you want to go to the Tangled Forest or not?’

  ‘Yeah, Arthur,’ pipes up Win. ‘What do you like more, your socks or your grandad?’

  With a sigh I take off my socks and hold them over the edge of the boat.
The merboy’s fingers close round them and he disappears with them under the water.

  ‘Great,’ I say. ‘He’s gone, and now I’ve not got my watch or any –’

  With a sudden lurch the boat shoots forward. I manage to grab on, but Win slams back into the jars between the seats. ‘MER-POWER!’ he cries as the merboy swims ahead of us, a rope held tightly in his sock-encased fist.

  The boat picks up speed, bumping over the waves and sending water spraying over us. Then I feel something bash against us. A moment later, a sleek silver tail flips out of the water and then a webbed hand grips the side of the boat, followed by another and another. I look around and realise that the water is packed full of mermaids and merboys all propelling us forward.

  Win scrambles back on to the bench as we fly over the surface of the sea. ‘What did you say to him, Rose?’ I shout.

  She turns round and her hair whips across her face. ‘I said I was Rose Trout, Master of Roar, and that we’d come back to save Roar and needed his help.’

  ‘WAHOOOO!’ screams Win. ‘HEAR HER ROAR!’ He attempts to high-five her, but she just scowls and bats him away like he’s an annoying furry.

  We’re pulled in Mitch’s boat on a winding journey through the Archie Playgo and then out across the Bottomless Ocean. The sea isn’t wild here like it is around the Crow’s Nest, but it’s still rough, and the three of us are forced to huddle together as waves hit us on all sides. The bumping and bouncing stops when we leave the Bottomless Ocean and sail up a wide river.

  We see the Tangled Forest way before we reach it. It’s a mighty wall of trees that rises up and dominates the skyline. The merfolk stay with us, pushing Mitch’s boat closer and closer to the forest until the trees tower over us, their leaves blocking out the sunlight.

  One by one the merfolk slip away, until just the first merboy is left pulling our boat. ‘I hope he knows what he’s doing,’ I say, gripping the side of the boat as we race towards the wide trunks.