by Joan Lennon
‘Eo. He’s dead.’
‘Dead? What do you mean?’ She seemed incapable of understanding what he was saying.
Adom pushed her gently aside and laid Eo on his back again. ‘I mean he’s not breathing any more, and his soul has left his body. Look at his face. See? He’s not there.’
There was a rustle from the darkness, and Hurple stepped slowly into the light from Adom’s torch. There were red stains round his muzzle and his sides heaved in and out. He looked at Eo and screamed.
It was like the cry of a banshee and the sound grated across their nerves.
‘Stop it!’ whimpered Jay.
With a huge effort, Hurple pulled himself together.
‘This is bad,’ he panted. ‘It’s very, very bad. But not as bad… as you think… the boy’s dead… but only here… and only now…’
He turned his back on them, fighting to regain control. Adom and Jay looked at each other in confusion, too stunned to even begin to reach towards hope. At last the ferret was able to continue.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost it like that. For a minute there I forgot where we were – what we are in the midst of. It’s not as bad as it looks. I know this is strange, but then it’s all strange, isn’t it? The Rules hold, however. Whatever happens is only good for one Tide. Eo is dead, but only for the duration of this Tide. The next Tide is a clean slate.’
There was a short, incredulous pause.
‘You’re trying to tell us he’s going to come back to life?!’ shrilled Jay. ‘You’re trying to tell us he’s dead but he’s going to get better?!’
‘That’s the Rules.’
‘But… I found this!’ Jay held out her hand, with the bloodstained ball on it. ‘I was looking for exit woun–’ She choked up completely then and, dropping the ball, stumbled blindly away up the beach.
Hurple nudged the thing with his nose and shuddered. ‘So this is what the Tide has given him. Pick it up, will you,’ he said to Adom, ‘and put it safe in his bag.’ He drew a deep breath that sounded very like a sob.
‘Unless… it’s death he was given,’ said Adom in a low voice as he stowed the bullet in Eo’s bag. ‘They gave him that – and freely.’
Hurple shook his head. ‘No, because he won’t be taking it with him when we move on. He’ll be leaving that behind.’ He looked up at the boy. ‘You’ll have to trust me on this, even though it’s not very likely.’
Adom stared numbly at him. ‘Didn’t he say before that he could heal himself? Except for those sores on his arm – that normally his people could do that?’
Hurple shook his head. ‘Not when they die. It doesn’t work like that. He can’t heal if he’s not consciously doing it.’ He took a deep breath and tried to speak reassuringly. ‘Come on, lad – you believe in the resurrection, don’t you? That’s all that’s happening here. It’s just a question of timing.’
‘Then why did you attack those men and chase them halfway to Loch Ness?’
Hurple bristled along the whole length of himself.
‘Nobody shoots at my boy,’ he said, showing his teeth.
‘Do you think they’ll come back?’ asked Adom.
‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Hurple said flatly.
Adom nodded. It didn’t even occur to him to find this statement absurd. The bigness of the Professor’s personality quickly blinded everyone around him to the smallness of his body.
‘Would you like me to pray for him now?’
Hurple cleared his throat, a little ferrety cough of emotion. ‘Thank you. You’re a good lad. I’ll go and see to Jay meantime.’
After praying for a while, Adom got off his knees and went up towards the tree line, where the soldiers’ fire was. It had almost burned itself out, but he salvaged the branches that were still glowing and bought them back to where Eo lay. Then he returned and collected the men’s gathered wood. He built up a fire near the boy’s body. All the time he was working, he was aware of Hurple’s voice, rising and falling in counterpoint to Jay’s tearful protests and disbelief. He didn’t know just what finally made it through her distress, but something the ferret was saying to her did.
‘You must be getting cold – come to the fire,’ he called.
Hurple came first, and Jay followed reluctantly. She was rubbing angrily at her face, as if ashamed of her swollen eyes and blotchy cheeks. She reminded him suddenly of one of his sisters, who always hated it if anyone saw her cry. He was hit with a completely unexpected stab of homesickness so strong it made him gasp.
‘What are you staring at?!’Jay snapped. She plonked herself down as close to the fire as she could get without setting herself alight, and hugged herself hard. ‘This is a lousy adventure. In fact it isn’t an adventure at all – it’s a disaster! It’s a fiasco! It’s a… mess!’
Adom began to fiddle with his wrist computer. A calamity. A catastrophe. A bad patch,’ he murmured. ‘The Slough of Despond…’
‘So you’ve found the thesaurus mode. Big deal. It doesn’t mean you’re all of a sudden smart.’ The girl glared at him.
‘Now, children!’ said Hurple in a warning voice. ‘Don’t squabble.’
Jay turned on him. And you’re not all of a sudden my mother!’ she snapped.
‘How true,’ the ferret murmured sympathetically. ‘But never mind.’
Jay caught Adom’s eye and couldn’t help bursting out laughing. It was a nervous reaction to all the tension, and the idea of the Professor as anybody’s mother was just so ludicrous…
‘Look, I’m sorry I said you were stupid, Adom. You’re not – you’re a better class than me altogether, and I guess I’m just jealous.’
‘But I am stupid – Brother Drostlin tells me that ten times a day. Even the Holy Father thinks so. I can’t… read or write and I have been trying for months.’ His voice sank low.
‘Well, of course not,’ said Jay. ‘No D’s going to be able to lay down the connections in that length of time, not by themselves, no matter what system you use. What system does your teacher use, by the way?’
‘Shout and hit?’ said Adom with a shrug.
Jay stared at him for a moment. Then, ‘Give me your arm,’ she said.
Wordlessly, Adom stuck out his arm, the one with the pink no-longer-all-that-fluffy wrist strap.
Jay tapped in a combination, twisting his arm round a bit to get some light on to the readout panel and then nodded.
‘Not yet, but not long now,’ she said. And definitely before you see that bully again. The patterners are laying down pathways in your brain steadily, without you feeling a thing, and once they’re there, if he tries to make out you can’t read or write,you can hit him. Hard.’
Adom’s eyes shone in the firelight. ‘It’s not just saints, then, who do miracles,’ he said.
Jay coloured, and threw another branch on to the flames.
‘Right. Well. What do we do now, Professor?’ she asked.
‘We wait. There’s nothing more we can do,’ he said.
‘OK. That’s what I thought.’ She nodded. ‘But this is a campfire, and if we’re sitting around a campfire, then we should be telling stories. Everybody knows that. Folk wisdom and all that. You first, Professor – tell us some stories.’
‘Tell us some stories about Eo,’ said Adom quietly.
Jay looked across at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That would be right, wouldn’t it? Let’s talk about Eo.’
And so they did. The living sat on one side of the fire and the dead lay on the other. It was as if no one wanted to sit with their back to his body, not from fear so much as not wanting to exclude him.
‘Tell us about the first time you met him,’ said Jay.
Hurple rubbed his nose with a paw. ‘Well, of course, I knew about him from when he was born, but I never spend time with the babies. I prefer a creature I can converse with. But I think the first time I really became aware of Eo was when he was still pretty small. I noticed this little figure skulking about in the bushes. He dodged
behind rocks. He snuck behind trees. Finally, I just had to know. “What are you doing?” I asked. And he looked up at me with those big eyes and he whispered, “Shhh. Don’t tell. I’m the shadow of the doubt.’ ”
He was met by blank expressions.
‘He must have heard somebody say it, see, “the shadow of a doubt”, and he didn’t know what it really meant, so he decided it must mean… I guess you had to be there,’ he concluded lamely.
‘Right,’ said Jay. ‘OK.’ She turned to Adom. ‘What did you think, Adom, when you first saw him? Were you completely amazed, or did you think he was just some guy?’
Adom shook his head. ‘No, I’d have to say I was more disappointed than amazed. When I first saw Eo, I thought he was supper.’
‘What?!’
‘I thought he was a dead seal. Or possibly a baby whale. I thought “Meat!” and “Feast!”’ Adom grinned sheepishly.
‘You greedy little…!’
‘Well? What did you think when you first saw him?’
Jay blushed. ‘None of your business…’ she began, and then she laughed. All right, all right. I thought he was beautiful – I mean, his hair – I thought his hair was beautiful. You can’t argue with that. Everybody agrees about the hair.’
Hurple and Adom nodded solemnly.
‘Were you his only teacher, Professor?’ Jay asked next.
‘Oh no. G children have many different tutors, each with a separate speciality. We’d get together, though, and compare notes on our pupils. Eo certainly got mentioned quite a lot.’ Hurple gave a wicked little grin. ‘For a while there, he had his own nickname among the tutors. He was still very young, you see, and hadn’t quite mastered the art of blowing his nose properly. But he was already adept at sliding out from responsibility for, well, anything, so we called him – perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this…’
‘You can’t not now! exclaimed Jay.
‘You really can’t,’ agreed Adom. ‘What did you call him?’
‘Oh well, all right. We called him “Snot my fault” – and if you ever tell him that I’ll pierce your ears for you with my teeth!’
Jay and Adom swore they would never betray him – and then asked for more stories.
‘There was the time he handed in a note to one of his tutors, explaining why he hadn’t done an assignment. It was four pages long, in rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter, and spoke at length on numerous figures from history who had also not handed things in on time, and ended with a vivid description of the alien green-eyed cat who had, in fact, ripped up all his notes and used them for litter.
‘It must have taken him hours longer to do than the actual assignment would have.’ Hurple shook his head fondly. ‘I think we were all a bit jealous he hadn’t written that note for us. There was a bit of a competition going as to who could collect the most exotic excuse from our Eo. He never stinted, and that’s for certain.’
Adom put some more wood on the fire and, as the sparks flew up, Hurple added quietly, ‘I’ll tell you the truth about that boy… he’s the most G person I have ever met.’
There was a silence after that for a while.
As the cold wet night wore on, they talked some more about Eo – Jay was particularly fascinated by his repertoire of homework excuses – and then without noticing they were talking about themselves, not Hurple so much, but the girl from the future and the boy from the past. And as the tide rose, and the night sky lightened towards morning, the ferret watched them turning from strangers into friends and allies.
9 The Throw of Lackey One
It’d been a frustrating night for Market Jones.
There was the wet, for one thing. It rained, on and off, pretty much the whole time. Gladrag and Cadence dealt with the discomfort by shifting into seals, with well-insulated bodies and waterproof fur. Since nothing seemed to be happening, they napped a good deal, which was sensible. Market Jones knew that sleep would have to be snatched whenever possible, or by the end of the Seven Tides they would all be too exhausted to think straight. But it was difficult not to resent his companions just a little, as they lay there, warm, snug and snoozing in bodies that made admirable sense. There was probably nothing in the Rules preventing him from shifting, yet somehow it didn’t seem right. It had been his throw – this was his Tide. His responsibility. So as the long night passed, Market kept watch over the viewing disc in his human form, getting wetter and colder and more fed up with each hour that passed.
The Kelpie Queen seemed to have no problem with the rain. Occasionally she would shudder her skin, the way horses do, and the wet would fly off But mostly she just ignored it. She may even have been enjoying the chilly drizzle – certainly, something had tickled her fancy, for she was grinning relentlessly, and Jones was sure he heard her chuckling from time to time.
Nothing he could see in their viewing disc was making him feel any better. In fact, there was very little to see and even less to hear.
‘I swear she’s given us a defective disc,’ he muttered, more than once.
There was some sporadic moonlight but the rain and clouds here at the G beach seemed to be just as heavy in the place where Eo was. And all the moonlight did show, was nothing. Nothing happening. The boy just lay there!
‘What does he think he’s doing?!’ he fumed to himself. ‘Young people nowadays have no get up and go.’
There had been a bit of excitement right near the beginning, with some sort of flashing light display. They’d all been watching then. That was when the sound shut down.
‘It’ll sort itself out in a minute,’ Hibernation Gladrag predicted confidently.
It hadn’t.
‘Should we ask her?’ Interrupted Cadence tilted his head at the Kelpie Queen. ‘Maybe she could fix it?’
She hadn’t. Even though they’d asked politely.
‘No sound?’ she said. ‘How irksome. But then these things do happen. Things die…’
It seemed an odd way to talk about technical difficulties. What did she know that they didn’t? They hung around for a bit, in the faint hope she might offer to share her disc, but the invitation wasn’t forthcoming. So the rest of the night was spent in sleeping by Hibernation Gladrag and Interrupted Cadence, and in grumbling, getting wet and feeding the fire by Market Jones.
The dawn was only a suggestion in the sky when the turn of the tide came at last. Market stood up stiffly and tried to stretch some of the kinks out of his back. The others lolloped over to him and then morphed upwards into human shape.
‘Your robes are wet,’ said Market shortly. ‘Everything’s wet.’
‘The sun will dry us all out in a while,’ said Hibernation in her placating voice. ‘And then you can try and catch some sleep.’
‘Has anything changed? Anything happen?’ asked Interrupted as he pulled the robe over his head while simultaneously trying not to let any of the cold, wet material touch his skin.
‘No.’ Market practically spat the word.
Gladrag was alternately checking the Tide Turn Calculating Device and peering into the viewing disc. ‘Shouldn’t he be getting up by now?’ she said, sounding worried. ‘I know boys that age sleep a lot, but this is hardly the time…’
‘He’s not sleeping. He’s dead.’ The Queen left her disc and slinked over to the G.
They stared at her, unable to speak.
‘Of course he’s dead. Surely you must have noticed he wasn’t moving very much?!’
‘We thought he was asleep!’ blurted Interrupted.
‘And the shooting? You didn’t notice those flashing lights? At the beginning of the Tide? What did you think that was?’ The Queen was basking in the horror on their faces.
‘I can’t believe it!’
‘But – does that mean…?’
‘No, no – it’s just for the duration of the Tide. He’s only dead then, not any other time,’ said Hibernation.
‘The poor child –’
‘Did he suffer?’
Anothe
r Tide wasted. Such a pity’ oozed the Queen.
Gladrag was just about to blow her diplomatic credentials by tearing a strip off visiting monarchy – when the Traveller suddenly flicked into sight again, ricocheted off the crest of a wave and raced towards the beach.
‘Steady!’ she warned.
‘Look out!’ yelped Interrupted.
‘Gotcha!’ cried Market Jones triumphantly. He landed flat on his stomach on the sand with his arms stuck out and the Traveller wobbling precariously between his two hands. The dive-catch may have lacked elegance, but it did the trick. Interrupted and Hibernation broke into a spontaneous round of applause.
Market grinned over at them and was about to struggle to his feet – but the Queen had other plans. With a contemptuous snap of her fingers, she summoned the miniature vortex and it leapt obediently from the G’s hands to land on her outstretched palm.
‘HEY!’ yelled Market Jones. He scrambled upright. ‘I caught that!’
‘Is she throwing again?’ gasped Interrupted.
‘Now just a minute,’ Hibernation began to protest. ‘It’s not your turn, for one thing, and for another thing, my Device says it’s not absolute Tide Turn yet, and for another other thing…’
But the Queen ignored them all. She stalked over to the main vortex and, with one long, clawed finger, pointed into the heart of the maelstrom.
The G knew that anything coming from the vortex would be evil. They knew it absolutely. Yet it seemed unbelievable that the being who stepped out of it now could possibly have anything to do with fear or pain. He was… lovely. He stood, head bowed, as if deep in thought – and it would not have occurred to even the most cynical observer that he was posing, making sure there was time for him to be seen. He was fine-boned, slim, elegant, with skin so pale it was almost blue. His hair crackled about his head like thin ice round the edges of a winter pond. The three G found themselves swept with the same irresistible attraction Eo had felt at first sight of the Kelpie Queen. He was just too beautiful to be bad. This must be the one Kelpie with the heart of gold, the one led astray in his youth, ready – desperate! – to change sides, to be redeemed…