“Have you ever seen so many different coloured corals, Faro?”
We are floating above a reef. Small, brilliant fish flicker in and out of pink coral branches. I’ve already seen a fish which is shaped like a bat and a fish with wide, stripy fins that look like wings. Some of the fish are so brightly coloured and weirdly shaped that they remind me of little kids’ paintings. But the colours are far too alive for paint. Earlier on Faro and I saw thousands of tiny bright green fish scudding away from a barracuda. We’ve seen tiger sharks too, and giant rays. None of them has threatened us.
We are resting for a while before we search for the next current. Elvira has taken Conor off to search for plants which she thinks she may be able to use in medicines.
Faro dives to look at the corals more closely. Suddenly he calls, “Sapphire! Come here! This reef is made of metal.”
I plunge through the clear turquoise water towards the shaggy mass of coral, weed, darting fish and sea anemones. Faro is right. I can see metal too. A steel-grey curve, almost obscured by the living things that have made their home on it. We swim along the reef.
“I think it’s a shipwreck, Faro.”
Faro points along the sea bed. “There’s another.” And another and another. We stare through the transparent water as wreck
after wreck appears in the distance, half buried in white sand.
“I wonder why there are so many? Where did they all come from?”
The water is not that deep here – no more than thirty metres – and very clear. I can’t see any rocks on which all these ships could have foundered. In spite of all the brilliant, teeming life that covers them, the half-buried ships look eerie. I focus on one of the smaller wrecks. There is something wrong about it. It doesn’t look like a ship at all.
“I’m going to swim up for a better view,” I tell Faro.
I swim up until I’m a few metres from the surface, in the sunwater, then gaze down at the wrecks. Immediately, as if a jigsaw puzzle has put itself together before my eyes, I see the blunt nose, the tail, the broken wings. It’s a plane. And there’s another, with its fuselage shattered into coral-covered pieces.
“I think there’s been a battle,” I say to Faro as he swims up beside me. “Those ships didn’t break up on rocks. They were sunk by something. Torpedoes or bombs, maybe,” I go on, forgetting that Faro probably won’t know what I’m talking about. “Maybe the planes were bombers.”
“You mean that all these wrecks destroyed one another?” asks Faro.
“Yes. They were enemies.”
“But now they are together.”
“Yes.” A school of crimson and orange fish shimmers above the wreck of a plane. “I wish I knew more about aeroplanes, then I’d know when all this happened. Which war it was, I mean.”
Faro shakes his head incredulously, looking at the wrecks which litter the sea floor. “So much metal,” he says.
“It must have been a huge battle.”
Faro nods. I’m expecting an attack on the ways of humans, but he surprises me. “We will have to fight a battle, too,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Ervys will not yield easily. We escaped the sharks, and his anger will be deeper and stronger than ever if we succeed in making the Crossing. He wants us to die.”
“I know. But no one seems to have followed us so far.”
“That doesn’t mean that we are safe.”
The reef is so beautiful and rich with life, but there will be bones buried deep in that white sand. My mind fills with planes roaring down the sky, guns blazing, oily smoke streaming behind them. They smashed through the skin of the water, and Ingo swallowed them. The shattered metal and shattered human beings would have sunk slowly to the floor of the ocean. After all the thunder of battle it would have been silent.
No one has ever wanted to kill me before.
“You always told me that the Mer didn’t have wars,” I say. “You were always saying that the Mer knew how to sort out their arguments without fighting.”
“I thought it was true,” says Faro grimly, “but it turns out that when we want something enough we will kill for our purposes, just like humans.”
“I want to go,” I say. “Let’s find the others.”
W
e’re skirting the edge of a huge kelp forest. Its dense, tangled mass sends a shiver through me. Faro doesn’t mind exploring a little way into the kelp, but I never go with him and I count the seconds until he swims free again. I wish he’d stay out in the clear water, but he only laughs at me and says he’s been swimming in kelp forests since he was a baby. Not forests like this, though, I’m sure of it. This one goes on for miles, dark and brooding. Anything might lie hidden in its depths. Even Faro has drawn away from it now, and he’s swimming up ahead with Elvira.
Suddenly Conor is at my side. “Saph! Look to your left.”
“What? Where?”
“Just between those two clumps of stems. There,” Conor whispers as if someone – or something – might hear us. “Turn your head slowly. Don’t make it obvious.”
I steal a look sideways. Nothing. Or was that a movement? The back of my neck prickles as I peer into the gloom, trying to make it look as if I’m just glancing casually at the kelp.
“There, Saph! Can you see it?”
I catch a glimpse of a shape flitting between two thick stems of kelp.
“What is it, Con?”
“I don’t know. Look, there’s another! Don’t let them know you’ve seen them.”
The shape moves again. And there’s another. There’s a head – a flicker of an arm – a tail …
“Conor, they’re Mer!” I exclaim much too loudly. Elvira and Faro hear me, twist round and are with us in a couple of powerful strokes.
“Mer! Look in the kelp forest. Not there, Faro, there!”
We can all see them now. A face glints through the gloom, then vanishes. A figure flickers into sight, then another and another. How many are there? I can’t see clearly through the shadows.
“They are Mer,” says Faro decisively. “I shall greet them.”
“But, Faro, do you think you should?” asks Elvira anxiously.
“They are not likely to be followers of Ervys. His influence can’t have spread this far. Of course we must greet our brothers and sisters.” He raises his voice and calls out, “Greetings and good wishes to you, friends. We are travellers making the Crossing of Ingo.”
Silence. Nothing moves. Perhaps they don’t understand.
Don’t be stupid,
I tell myself. Faro is speaking full Mer. Of course they’ll understand. Even Conor does now. He’s been in Ingo so long that the language has poured itself into him.
“Greetings, friends!” calls Faro, more loudly this time.
Again there’s no answer. A long pause, and then a stir among
the stems of kelp. A single figure emerges. He is Mer, but much smaller than any Mer I’ve seen. The sheen of his skin is a deep, tropical blue, like colour taken from a butterfly’s wings. His hair is cropped as short as stubble on his skull. It’s the first time we’ve seen a Mer person, male or female, with short hair.
He swims towards us, cutting the water with the ease of a dagger. His face is calm, but his eyes are wary.
“Greetings,” he says as he comes up to us. His tail flicks lightly from side to side, holding him in place. He looks from me to Conor and I see his eyes widen with astonishment. I’m used to this look from Mer I haven’t met before – when they encounter a human being in Ingo, not drowning but living underwater like one of the Mer. This man controls his surprise well.
“Greetings,” we say one by one, and hold out our hands, palm open, to show our friendship.
“You speak our language,” he says to me.
“Yes. I have Mer blood.”
His look of interest quickens. “I have heard stories about such as you,” he says. “In our childhood we believe such tales, but then we grow up and put them from our minds. So there is truth in the legends.”
I smile at him self-consciously, not sure whether or not I like the idea of being a legend. Suddenly he jackknives, whips round and flickers in and out between the four of us so fast that his body is a blur of blue. Before we have time to react he is back in place, his face impassive. It’s a display of skill that even Faro couldn’t match.
“That was amazing,” says Conor. The man doesn’t smile, but perhaps his face softens a little.
“My name is Sapphire,” I say, and point to the others in turn, “Faro … Conor … Elvira …” But the Mer man does not respond with his own name.
“We come as friends,” says Faro, with an edge to his voice. “Do the Mer of these parts not wish to learn one another’s names?”
“If I give you my name, how shall I get it back?” says the man reasonably, whisking his tail as if he longs to make another circuit. He is so fascinating that I can’t help watching every move he makes. Somehow I’ve drifted round so that my back is to the kelp forest.
“Saph,” says Conor very quietly, “look behind you.”
I glance over my shoulder, and freeze. There are figures appearing at the edge of the kelp forest. Ten of them – twenty – no, more are coming from behind every thick stem and out of every pool of shadow.
“My people,” says the Mer man calmly. They are all small, like him, but just as lithe and sinuous. They could surround us in half a second.
“We come as friends,” repeats Faro, and I realise that he has also seen the crowding figures. “Know that we are making the Crossing of Ingo.”
All the Mer recognise the Crossing of Ingo as the greatest journey they will ever make. Faro always told me that even those Mer who were never chosen to make it were bound to give any assistance they could to those who were on the
Crossing. But that was never entirely true, was it? Look at Ervys. He did everything in his power to stop us. Maybe there are other Mer who are equally hostile, for their own reasons. Maybe we’ve just found some of them.
“We have heard of the Crossing,” says the Mer man. “We tell our children stories about that, too.”
Faro stares at him in disbelief. “But you are Mer. Surely …”
“We are the Mer of the kelp forests. Our blood is older and truer than any other. Before the oceans divided from the land, before Ingo came into being, we were.”
“But … but to be Mer and not to make the Crossing of Ingo …” says Faro slowly, as if he can’t take it in.
Fortunately, the Mer man doesn’t seem to be offended. “Our place is in the kelp forest,” he says. “The forest is our mother and our home and gives us everything we need. Why should we travel?”
The other figures are edging forward a little. Mer children peep from the shelter of the thickest kelp stems. All of them have the same shorn hair. Their eyes shine through the gloom, bright with curiosity. The children’s skin is an even darker and more beautiful blue than the adults’.
“We should like to meet more of your people,” says Faro boldly.
Faro, why did you have to say that? There are hundreds of them.
Why does Faro have to be so reckless? Maybe he thinks he’ll be able to convince them that they should make the Crossing too.
“I will speak to them,” says the Mer man. Without warning he
flashes away from us into the shadowy border of the kelp forest. A group gathers around him, but we can’t hear what they’re saying. With a swirl, he is back with us.
“Our children would like to meet you,” he announces, looking directly at me. “Our little ones have never seen a human being in Ingo.”
“Let them come out here, then,” says Conor quickly.
“They cannot leave the forest.”
“Then I’ll go with my sister. I am human too.”
Elvira looks desperately anxious. Faro puts his hand on my arm protectively. “Our friends might lose themselves in the kelp forest,” he says.
“They will remain on the edge of the forest where you can see them,” says the Mer man with a touch of anger in his voice. “Our children are only children. You say you come as friends, yet you seem to suspect us.”
“We’d be glad to meet the children,” I break in to stop Faro arguing. I’m not sure why it’s so important to these Mer that their children meet us, but there are only four of us, and hundreds of them. They swim much faster than we do, so escape isn’t an option. They could easily surround us and carry us off into their forest. If we do what they want, maybe they’ll help us. I want to find the whale’s daughter so much, and talk to her. Perhaps these Mer know where the whales go.
The forest is a maze of thick stems, tangled roots and weaving strands. The light from the surface breaks up into a confusing camouflage net of shadows. If I went even a hundred
metres into the forest, I’d never find my way out again. The stems would cage me like prison bars.
Conor and I swim to the edge of the forest. Adult Mer watch us closely, without moving. I have the feeling that there are many more pairs of eyes watching me than figures that I can see.
“Keep still. The children will come out soon,” says the Mer man. I wait, my skin tingling with suspense. There is a stir in the shadows, and then another. With incredible swiftness, two tiny figures dart towards me, stop dead, quiver in the water and then swim on very slowly. They are young children, maybe six or seven. Four girls and four boys. Behind them more children emerge from their hiding places. They swim around us with the same dazzling speed as the adult Mer, skimming the stems of kelp. Now I see why they cut their hair short. The kelp is so thick that they’d get tangled in it a hundred times a day if they had long hair.
There’s a light touch on my back. I turn and a little Mer girl snatches her own hand away, giggling.
“It’s all right,” I say. “I’m not going to bite you.” She gives me a gap-toothed smile. She’s so sweet I’d like to give her a hug. The rest of the children are shyer. They circle us, diving down to stare at our feet in wonder. One little boy puts out a tentative finger to Conor’s big toe, but he’s not brave enough. Conor wriggles his toes in the water and the Mer boy shoots up and away. The children aren’t really scared of us. They’re thrilled and inquisitive and a bit overcome by their own
daring. They cluster together, their arms wrapped around one another. They whisper excitedly, turn around for another peep at the amazing sight of our legs and feet, and then burst into high, shrilling laughter.