The Crossing of Ingo (14 page)

Wave-Rider, who was silent while Elvira treated us, now says, “We must hurry before the shark tells his fellows where we are. The sharks believe that you are going south.”

“Of course we must travel south,” Faro cuts in. “There’s no
other way to make the Crossing of Ingo. Since the time of our ancestors …”

“You will never make the Crossing if you continue south,” goes on the dolphin. His voice is calm and logical. “If you go south, the sharks will swallow your bones. Even if you escape them – which cannot happen, I think – Ervys will have set other traps in your way. He is determined that you will not make the Crossing of Ingo.” The dolphin’s skin ripples as he flexes his muscles. “Ervys fears you. If Ingo is healed, and the human world and our world can live without enmity, then the Mer will not need him. This is what Saldowr tells us.”

The thought of the sharks hammers at my mind. We’ve got to get away.

“We could go north,” says Conor.

“North?”

“The world’s round, isn’t it? Surely we can still cross Ingo if we go north.”

“North?” repeats Faro with such intensity that at first I think he’s angry with Conor. It’s another case of Breaking All the Laws of the Mer, I suppose. But maybe it’s better to break a few laws than to end up in a shark’s belly …

“North!”
Faro mutters again. His eyes glow. “North, of course! Why didn’t I think of that? No Mer ever made the Crossing of Ingo that way—”

“But, Faro, they must have done,” I break in. “Don’t you remember you once told me that some of the Mer dived under icebergs and met ice bears with claws like hooks. There aren’t
any bears in the south – at least I don’t think there are.”

“The bears are only a story for children,” says Faro.

“Stories have to come from somewhere,” says Conor. “Polar bears only live in the Arctic as far as I know. Maybe long ago the Mer
did
travel that way.”

And maybe Faro believes us. “A northern Crossing …” he says as if to himself. Longing and excitement stir in his voice. “It will be an even greater adventure …”

Elvira, by contrast, looks distinctly cross. “But, Faro,” she says in a tone of sweet reason, “if the Mer have taken the southern route for generations, then surely that must be because it’s the best one? Why risk going where none of us knows the way?”

“Why risk anything at all? Why not go home and let Ervys rule over Ingo?” snaps Faro.

Elvira refuses to lose her temper. “You know I didn’t mean that. But we have to be practical.”

“Practical? So which do you think is the
practical
choice? Being eaten by a shark, or giving up and going home in shame?” It looks as if we’re on the brink of a full-scale sibling row – I wonder what Elvira will look like when she’s in a real rage – but Conor cuts through their argument.

“We can go through the Arctic Ocean. How frozen will it be now in October, Saph?”

“I don’t know. It starts to freeze up again in August, I think.”

“I wonder if we could dive under the Pole. I don’t suppose it matters how thick the ice is, as long as there’s free water under it. There’s a channel between Asia and America – I can’t
remember what it’s called. It freezes in winter, but we can swim under the ice and then south again. We’ll be into the North Pacific by then …”

“North Pacific,”
says Faro a little scornfully.
Where is that written on the water?
he’ll demand if I say “Atlantic”.

“Call it what you like,” says Conor impatiently. “We haven’t got time to argue. We can’t let ourselves be killed. We can’t give up. That only leaves one option.”

“North …”
Faro lingers on the word as if he likes the taste of it. “I have gone some way north, but never far. There are currents which will take us there, but they are wild and dangerous. Ervys will not think of us taking the Northern Passage. The whales and the fulmars say that the ice joins together and becomes the Frozen Ocean.” I think of Dad’s map and the vast, shapeless mass of ice to the North.

“Everyone knows that there are monsters to the North, made of snow and ice,” Faro goes on. “They prowl the surface of the Frozen Ocean and sometimes they plunge deep into the water, searching for prey. Ervys will expect us to try again by the south. He will keep his forces there, waiting for us …”

“Let him wait! We’ll be long gone by the time he realises!” says Conor excitedly.

Conor and Faro both laugh aloud, showing their teeth. They slap hands as Conor taught Faro to do. How alike they are. Their warm dark colouring, their brown-black hair, the strength in their arms and shoulders and the fierce determination on their faces. I wish I could feel as confident that we can outwit Ervys.
Once he finds out that we haven’t gone south, won’t he pursue us?

“What do you think of the North, little sister?” Faro asks me.

“I prefer it to the sharks.”

Faro laughs again. “What about the ice monsters?”

“I don’t believe in them,” I say firmly. “They are mythical creatures.” And then I think uncomfortably,
As I believed the Mer were before I came to Ingo.

“When we come to the monsters I will tell them that you don’t believe in them.”

Faro’s face gleams with delight. He seems to have thrown off the memory of the sharks as a seal’s skin throws off water. For the first time since his injury, he throws himself forward and executes a slow but perfect somersault.

“We will escort you past the Lost Islands,” says Wave-Rider as we swim away together. “We will keep company with you westward until you are well beyond these sharks’ territory. But there we shall have to leave you. We have young ones who cannot travel farther, and Scylla needs time to recover from her wound. Keep well out of land. There are nets which have trapped many of our people. They hold us beneath the water and we drown. Swim on until there is no more land to the west of you. Then listen until you hear where north is. From there, you must find your way.”

T
he dolphins have left us now. It was hard to see them go. I pressed my cheek against Scylla’s face and told her we’d never forget that the dolphins had risked their own lives to protect us from the shark.

Just before they left, the dolphins made a circle around us as they did when the shark attacked. They wove in and out of one another, plunging and somersaulting. They leaped upwards, breached the surface, then crashed down through the water. They rushed towards us, stopped dead so that the sea surged around them, and nuzzled us gently with their snouts.

“Goodbye, dear Scylla.”

“Goodbye, Wave-Rider.”

“Goodbye, Amaris.”

“Goodbye …”

We stared after them until we couldn’t see them any more. The last of their calls faded into the sounding of the sea. We felt very alone without dolphin music all around us.

We’ve been alone for three days now. At first we were on edge and looking out for sharks all the time. We’ve seen plenty
of basking sharks, and a pod of minke whales passed us and greeted us, but there’s been no sign of a Great White. We’re beginning to relax, but we don’t sleep much. One of us is always on guard while the others float, resting. I dream a lot, but I don’t sleep deeply. A part of my mind is always alert and watchful.

It’s strange when it’s your turn to stay awake while the others sleep. The sea is never still and never silent. You jump at a shadow, but it’s only a shoal of fish. You hear a distant calling of whales, but can’t make out what they are saying. Moonlight filters down, making ghostly blue glimmers on the others’ faces.

None of us rests for long. We’ve got to keep swimming, and besides, you don’t seem to need much sleep in Ingo. We don’t need to eat much either. Faro and Elvira have showed us all the edible weeds and sea grasses. Sometimes we find sea grapes, and there’s another type of fruit which only grows in fast-flowing water. Elvira calls them current berries. They look like frogspawn and they feel slimy when you swallow them, but they are very filling.

Faro and Elvira know every plant, but they won’t touch even the smallest shrimp. They can’t imagine eating a fish, let alone another mammal like a seal. It’s as barbarous to them as eating a baby would be to us. Once, when I first knew Faro, I made the mistake of saying that mackerel have to be eaten quickly once they’re caught or they go off. Faro looked at me with fascinated disgust.
“Go off,”
he repeated and shook his head. “Why not eat them when they’re alive, then?”

“Faro, that would be horrible!”

“So killing them isn’t horrible?”

The Mer have other ways of nourishing themselves besides eating. If we grow tired Elvira tells us to rest and draw the sea deep into our lungs so that the nutrients and minerals can pass into our bodies. It’s a wonderful feeling. I imagine breathing pure oxygen must be like this. You feel a rush of energy and power. Your heart seems to pump more strongly, and you can think more clearly. I never really feel hungry in Ingo.

“Isn’t it strange that what drowns you in the human world is what feeds you here?” I said to Conor once.

“Our
world, you mean,” he answered sharply. Conor moves as easily through Ingo as I do now. He never struggles for oxygen as he used to do, as if he was having an underwater asthma attack. That was so frightening. But even though Conor’s as much at home physically as me, mentally the human world – Air – is always home to him.

We’ve been travelling west, as the dolphins instructed. We are a long way from land now. You can smell land when you’re in Ingo, just as you can smell it when you’re out sailing and you catch the first scent long before you see the smudge of a cliff on the horizon. It’s a sharp, mineral smell, quite different from the smell of Ingo. You can smell the pollution too: all the filth that humans pour into Ingo, as Faro expresses it. I’d hate to swim near the mouth of an estuary where there’s a big city like London or New York. The taste of the water would make me gag.

Even way out in the Atlantic we find plastic drifting through the water. You have to be careful with small pieces of plastic and with plastic bags. They can get lodged in your throat and choke you. Faro says many creatures die that way every year.

I love it down here, just deep enough to feel safe but not deep enough to be swallowed up by darkness.

“It’ll be time to turn north soon,” says Faro.

“Faro, do you think Ervys is going to send some of his followers after us?” I ask.

Faro frowns. “The young Mer who make the Crossing in Ervys’s name will all take the southern route. No shark will stop them. Ervys will not want his supporters to scatter too far. The North is wide and they would struggle to guess our route.”

“But it’s possible, Faro.”

“I think Ervys will not attack us when we expect it, little sister. He is too cunning for that. He was defeated in the Assembly chamber, but he must have been sure that the shark would kill us. Now he wants us to forget to fear him. Only then will he strike. But I promise you, little sister, Saldowr and the dolphins will be doing everything in their power, every moment, to protect us from Ervys and his forces. It is a hard task. Ervys is as wily as he is strong.”

“You seem to know him really well.”

“Saldowr has taught me to know him.”

The two of us are swimming together, ahead of Elvira and Conor, who are having one of their deep discussions about nothing of interest to anyone else. I am keeping an eye on the
Conor/Elvira relationship. They swim very close together, but the last time I dropped back and casually listened to a fragment of their conversation, Elvira was telling Conor how to articulate a damaged tail spine if the injury were close to the fin –
Of course, with a higher vertebral injury the manipulation would be quite different –
Conor appeared to be listening attentively, but did I detect a slightly glazed look in his eyes? I put on speed, and came up alongside Faro again.

“Elvira’s very dedicated, isn’t she?” I observed.

“To what?” asked Faro.

“To healing, of course.”

Faro grinned maliciously. “I wasn’t sure what you meant.”

The farther we get from the sharks, the lighter our spirits. Already it feels as if we’ve been travelling for weeks, not a few days. I wonder how much human time has passed, then I put the thought aside because it’s no use worrying about that. The truth is that I’m not really worrying at all. Ingo is so strong around me. My human life still seems clear – it hasn’t vanished into a fog as it’s done before when I’ve been in Ingo – but it has the clarity of a brilliant painting or a perfect description. I have to remind myself that human life is something real which I’ve experienced myself.