by Nadia Aguiar
An instant later a tremendous clanging broke out in the skies, as if all the doors in a great, sprawling house were slamming shut one after the other as. In a rage, the mandrill swung from arm to arm between whorls, closing them behind him. The crashing echoed deafeningly around the lake, rattling Penny’s teeth.
As the whorls shut, the winds died. Penny reached the island on a fading puff of breeze. She tucked deftly in to shore, and Tabba and Jebby had just enough time to leap on board as the boat passed. The Pamela Jane glided a little further and came to a stop, becalmed, in the middle of the lake.
All the whorls were closed. The sails fell slack. The air was still and silent, the surface of the lake flat. There wasn’t a lick of breeze to sail on. With nothing to hurry it along, a layer of steam amassed and lay stationary. Penny felt like the air had been sucked out of her lungs. She looked around fearfully, not knowing where the mandrill would appear from next.
A shadow passed over the deck. A moment later the boat rocked dangerously. The children seized the railings to keep their balance. Penny looked up and saw that the mandrill had jumped through a whorl and landed on the top of the mast, his burly silver shoulders lustrous, his garish mask bright against the low grey screen of sky.
‘Get into the cabin!’ she shouted to Tabba and Jebby.
The mandrill sprang into the air and vanished into a whorl. He reappeared in a crouch on the bow just as the children dived through the hatch and scrambled down the companionway. Penny was the last one in. As she reached up, she saw him leap across the deck, saw his blue-furred toes land inches away. She slammed the hatch shut as hard as she could.
‘He’ll be in here in a second,’ she cried breathlessly.
She ran to open a porthole. It was stiff, but she forced it open with her shoulder. Steam poured in. She slung a leg through and waved to Tabba and Jebby to follow her.
‘Trust me!’ she shouted. ‘JUMP!’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Shell ✵ Field of Snares ✵ Palmos ✵ Like St Elmo’s Fire
Penny hit the ground.
For a moment she was afraid that the others weren’t going to follow her through the porthole, but then there was a thud followed by a second thud as first Tabba and then Jebby appeared out of thin air and rolled on to the dirt on the hillside. The children had dropped not into the bubbling boil of the hot springs but on to a patch of dry land just off a darkening road. Instantly the steam dissipated. The whorl was gone, sealed shut behind them. The mandrill had not come with them.
‘Are you OK?’ Penny asked.
‘We’re OK,’ said Tabba. ‘Are you?’
‘Yes,’ said Penny, taking a deep breath. ‘I’m OK.’
‘What was that boat?’ asked Jebby. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘And how did we get here?’ asked Tabba.
‘It was my family’s boat, from home,’ said Penny.
As briefly as she could, she explained how she had met Kal in the Gorgonne, and her discovery that she, too, could open whorls. Tabba and Jebby listened in amazement.
Slowly the children became aware of their new surroundings. A frog disturbed by their arrival hopped deeper into the foliage. Voices came from the nearby road. People passed, heading down the hill, not noticing the children in the trees. The evening breeze was briny – they were near the sea. It cooled the children’s skin, still flushed and sweaty from the hot springs. With a sinking feeling, Penny realized that they had left the Gorgonne without getting a shell. In the panic to escape from the mandrill, she had forgotten all about it.
But Tabba was taking something out of her bag. She peeled back cushioning layers of cloth and carefully handed an object to Penny.
Relief and elation flooded Penny as she saw what it was.
‘You got one,’ she said softly. She took a shaky breath.
The shell from the shores of the boiling lake was a hollow spiral flute. Its glossy swirls lapped each other, tapering to a fine point. It was smooth and cool, clear as crystal. Little clouds of condensation were still caught in it from the steam of the springs.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘It isn’t the only one,’ said Jebby, getting to his feet. ‘There were thousands there. Kal could already be in Palmos with one of them. It could all be over already.’
Tabba stood up and peered through the trees.
‘We’re on top of a hill,’ she said. ‘I think I can see the amphitheatre. Palmos is right down there in the valley.’
The three of them hurried to the road, but as soon as they reached it they stopped dead in their tracks. The trees had broken and exposed the sky over a broad valley. Not even the whorl that had unleashed the dust storm over Santori could have prepared the children for the sight before them now.
Like a weather front that had moved in and stalled were dozens, maybe hundreds, of dark whorls in the pale violet sky over the valley. Some were small, some huge – bigger even than the dust-storm whorl in Santori. Some were static, others trembled. A few swirled restlessly. Most of the whorls the children had seen before were blurred patches, smudges that blended in with the background and were often almost impossible to detect. But there was no missing these. They were dense and opaque. The sky looked like a field set with dark snares.
Penny knew that the mandrill had opened each one of them and could be looking down from anywhere. His oppressive presence weighed heavily on the valley.
It wasn’t until the children started down the hill that they noticed that it was full of people. Families huddled together, looking up at the whorls, arms round each other’s shoulders. Subdued children burrowed in their parents’ laps. Never had such a large festival crowd been so quiet. There was no strumming or drumming, no voices lifted in song, no celebration at all. Cooking fires dotted the valley here and there, and the air was hazy with smoke. There was a feeling of temporary stillness, of suspense, as though the whorls were stormclouds about to burst.
People were so focused on the whorls, eyes turned up to the sky, that the children passed undetected through the gathering darkness. The limestone crescent of the amphitheatre held the last of the light. The navy-blue sea reposed at the foot of the valley. Tremendous middens were heaped along the shoreline, burnished orange in the last of the sunset, like the studded backs of monstrous crocodiles rising for a breath. Torches were being lit in the town, and the wagging flames seemed to suck up the last of the daylight, concentrating it, while the rest of the air grew darker.
Finally someone saw the children and pointed. The crowd melted away to let them through, opening a path to the Council of Elders.
The Council was assembled on a large, flat tablet of stone at the base of the amphitheatre. Beside them was the stone dial. Its single chiselled hand, the length of a man, was pointed almost directly north, like an arrow tensed to leave the bow. Blooms past had described a deepening circle into the rocky tablet with each slow, grinding revolution of its hand. In mere hours from now its latest turn would be complete.
Penny raised the shell over her head as she approached.
In the crowd, faces waxy from the day’s sweat glowed in the torchlight. Mouths were open in small dark ‘O’s.
It’s the child from the Outside!
She has a shell!
Is that really it? Does she really have it?
Penny handed the shell to Elder. The other councilmen gathered closer to examine it.
Elder looked up at the children. ‘You’ve done it,’ he said simply.
The children were too overwhelmed to speak. The whorls temporarily forgotten, the crowd near the platform shuffled and murmured restlessly, pressing close to try to see what was happening. Everything felt surreal to Penny, as if she was in a dream and things were happening outside her control. She tried to pay attention to what Elder was saying. Though he was just feet away, his voice sounded like it was coming from a great distance.
‘Tomorrow morning you’ll walk – alone – to the Great Wave and gather the Bloom,’ he said. ‘The wave
will hold firm while one person enters and then leaves it. After that you’ll have just enough time to return safely to shore with the Bloom before it breaks. You’ll immediately pour the Bloom into the Coral Basin. Do you understand?’
‘Yes,’ said Penny breathlessly. ‘Except I don’t know where the Coral Basin is –’
‘The Coral will only be revealed tomorrow, after the Wave,’ said Elder. ‘You’ll spend the night in contemplation, as the Bloom Catcher always has. The Council will come to collect you in the morning.’
The static roar of the crowd was growing louder. Elder nodded to two men in red silk robes, who approached the children. Then he turned to the crowd and proclaimed: ‘The child from the Outside is the Bloom Catcher!’
For a split second silence fell over the valley. After all the preparations and festivities, the tracking of favourites since the first feats were done, the thrilling tales of the gruelling trials, after all the miles crossed by Players and ordinary people alike, it was done: a winner had been declared. And the unlikeliest of winners, at that – a young girl, an Outsider. People could not hide their disbelief. But quickly all distinguishing facts about Penny melted away, and she became a pure thing: the Bloom Catcher, the one who tomorrow would gather the Bloom and banish the mandrill back to the Gorgonne, who would close the whorls and restore Kana to safety and prosperity. A single shout went up and soon the whole valley erupted in celebration that echoed up to the whorls above, making them tremble like spiders in a giant web.
Penny felt the men in red robes lift her on to their shoulders. She reached desperately for Tabba and Jebby but was swept up and carried, feeling suddenly seasick, over the heads of the jubilant crowd and along the main street on to an empty road along the coast.
Penny was taken to a tiny palm hut on the shore of a lagoon. The people who had brought her returned to the town. The hut was a single, spare room, with a porch that faced the lagoon and a few stray palms, and, beyond them, the open sea. A meal had been left under a basket on the porch for her: a yellow bed of cassava with translucent onions, leafy vegetables and the tiny bright bubbles of sea eggs. She had eaten ravenously, wiping the plate clean.
After she had eaten and explored around the hut, she had nothing to do, so she wandered to the end of the porch and sat down. It was fully dark now, the sky littered with stars. The whorls were concentrated far away, in the distance over the valley, and away from them the air felt fresher. Penny could see back to the road that ran through thick cane fields. Here and there were the flickering torchlights of guards posted along the route. She wished Tabba and Jebby were there, and she wondered where Seagrape was and if she was safe. A thought occurred to her and made her heart quicken: maybe Seagrape had found Helix. It was possible. The three flags were still in Penny’s backpack. She knew he was out there somewhere.
The sea purring softly against the smooth stones of the lagoon slowly lulled her, soothing her racing, disjointed thoughts. She closed her eyes. She was the Bloom Catcher. It still didn’t seem real.
But it was. Her grandmother’s health would be restored. Everything at home would go back to the way it had been. Penny sent a silent message out across the dark sea: I’m coming home soon and I’m bringing the Bloom for you.
But first there was the Wave.
It seemed impossible to believe that tomorrow the sea, so deceptively peaceful, would rise up into a monstrous wall of water. She wondered nervously what it would be like to dive into it. And what would the Bloom look like? She remembered what the others had said that first day they had picked her up in the boat: pollen, blue-green fires, glowing sand. What if it wasn’t like any of those things?
The moon came out and lit the cane like a silver sea. An insect ticked in the palm fronds and the sea swished gently on the rocks. The cane grass stirred.
‘Penny!’
Penny saw Jebby’s face poking through the grass. He hissed her name again. She looked both ways. ‘No one’s here,’ she said, beaming. ‘Come on!’
Tabba and Jebby slipped out of the cane grass and dashed across the clearing to the porch.
‘There are guards posted all along the road!’ said Jebby. ‘We had to sneak all the way here through the cane.’
‘I’m so happy to see you!’ cried Penny.
‘They took you away so fast,’ said Jebby. ‘We had to wish you luck before tomorrow.’
‘And we brought this for you, from Ma,’ said Tabba. ‘She and Da are here, with all the little ones.’
She handed Penny a few slices of sweet bread wrapped in a banana leaf, the same kind Ma Silverling had given them the morning they had left for the first trial. Penny felt a pang – she was glad her friends had reunited with their family, but she couldn’t let herself think of her own, not yet, not until she was actually on her way home. She shared the bread with Tabba and Jebby, then tore off a piece for herself.
The children had not had time to really see each other since their escape from the Gorgonne, and now they shared in more detail everything that had happened after the mandrill had seized Tabba and Jebby. Tabba and Jebby described to Penny their dizzying flight through the whorls, each of them tucked beneath one of the mandrill’s arms, until finally he deposited them on the tiny stone island in the middle of the boiling lake. And Penny told them about finding the flags from Helix, and about meeting Kal, and the strange whorls she had passed through.
‘So Helix really is here!’ said Tabba, looking suddenly starstruck.
‘I’m impressed you went through all those whorls in the Gorgonne by yourself,’ said Jebby. ‘You’re brave, Penny.’
A large wave lapped the shore, its foam white in the moonlight.
‘Can you believe that in the morning you’re going to walk out to the Wave!’ said Tabba. ‘Are you scared?’
‘No,’ said Penny. ‘Well, a bit. I wish we were all going together. It doesn’t seem fair – we did the trials together.’
‘It’s fair,’ said Jebby. ‘You were the one who did the feat. We would never been able to do anything if you hadn’t crossed the Blue Line.’
‘To tell you the truth, I’m glad we just get to watch from shore,’ said Tabba. ‘I can’t imagine going out to meet the Wave. The three trials were enough for me.’
‘We’ve been invited to sit with the Council of Elders,’ added Jebby proudly.
Penny was relieved to see that her friends harboured no secret wish to be the ones walking out to the Wave. They’d come as far as they needed to. She was the one who had really wanted the Bloom all along.
‘What about Kal?’ she asked. ‘Have you seen him?’
‘We heard he got here a little while after we did, but when he found out that we were already here he ran off,’ said Jebby. ‘No one’s seen him since then, but I’m sure he’s skulking around somewhere nearby. There’s no way he won’t want to see the Wave, even if he isn’t the Bloom Catcher.’
‘I almost feel sorry for him,’ said Tabba. ‘Almost. Then I think about everything he did – or tried to do – to us.’
‘Try to forget about him tonight,’ said Jebby. ‘Tonight we should just be happy.’
‘One thing,’ said Penny. ‘I still don’t know what or where the Coral Basin is.’
‘No one does,’ said Jebby cheerfully. ‘It’s hidden until after the Wave. We found that out for you, at least.’
At a sound from the road, Tabba and Jebby hopped lightly to their feet.
‘We’d better go,’ said Jebby. ‘That may be a guard coming. We aren’t supposed to be here! Good luck tomorrow, Penny.’
‘Yes, good luck,’ said Tabba. ‘It’s going to be amazing. Tomorrow morning you’ll have the Bloom!’ She hugged Penny and then she and Jebby disappeared into the cane.
Penny held her breath, but no one else approached.
She felt lonely after Tabba and Jebby had left. She looked up at the hills where the whorls were clustered ominously. She thought about Kal, out there somewhere, licking his wounds. The lagoon shone,
still as black glass. The tide was seeping out slowly. The sound of the people in the valley was a distant buzz only when the wind carried it, and the campfires on the black silhouettes of the hills seemed as far away as the stars.
She looked back at the road. She had thought that maybe … but, no, there was no one there. She didn’t know if he would show up. He had disappeared once before without saying goodbye. He could do it again. She took out the three flags and hung them from the railing of the porch – a welcome – and sat down to wait.
Before long, she heard the sound of wings. In the moonlight she saw the parrot zigzagging like St Elmo’s fire over the cane, keeping pace with the person walking hidden through the tall grass below.
The parrot left the cane and landed lightly on the porch beside Penny, then flew to her shoulder and nuzzled her cheek. Relief and joy washed powerfully over Penny, and she thought she might weep.
‘You’re all right,’ she whispered.
She pressed her face against Seagrape’s soft feathers and listened to the beloved rumbling sound the parrot made when she was happy.
The cane at the edge of the clearing stirred, almost imperceptibly. It didn’t rustle madly like when Tabba and Jebby had come through. The person moving through it now was silent as a cat. Penny felt her heart thud in her chest.
She got to her feet, Seagrape still on her shoulder, and watched as he stepped out into the moonlight.
‘Hello,’ she said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Strangers ✵ A Deep, Old Familiarity ✵ World in Transition
Helix had been a teenager the last time Penny had seen him. Now he was a grown man. He was clean-shaven, but his cheeks were paler than the rest of his face, so she knew he’d had a beard he’d shaved only recently, perhaps that same day. His clothes were shabby but clean. His fingernails had been freshly scrubbed. Still, there was some suggestion of transience about him, of someone not wholly settled in the world.
Penny studied him, reconciling the omissions and exaggerations of memory with the real person in front of her, at once utterly different and exactly the same. She remembered how he used to hoist her on to his shoulders to lift her into the branches of the orange tree, and part of her wanted to run and jump into his arms like she used to. But it was painfully obvious to both of them: they were strangers to each other now. She saw him look behind her, saw him quickly hide his disappointment when he saw she was there on her own.