Gods and Warriors (20 page)

She was so furious that she almost forgot to be frightened of the cave.

Grinding her teeth, she wriggled through the entrance and dropped into the gloom, where she plunged the waterskins into the stream and held them under by their necks, as if she were strangling kittens.

But once she was climbing back up the headland, laden with two heavy waterskins, her rage burned off and her spirits plummeted. Of course Hylas didn’t want her. Why would he? She was useless. And shouting at him had achieved nothing—except to prove that she couldn’t keep her temper, and thus wasn’t worth taking along.

He was right too, about her having nowhere to go. Desolation swept over her. No one in the whole world cared about her.

A trickle of pebbles above her, and she glanced up to see Hylas skittering down toward her.

“What is it now?” she said dully.

Grabbing her wrist, he yanked her after him down the slope. “Quick!” he panted. “Where’s this cave?”

“What?”

“The cave, the cave, we’ve got to hide!
Ships!
”

“S
pirit warned me,” panted Hylas as they scrambled down the slope. “He kept slamming his tail.”

“How many ships?” said Pirra.

“Two. But they’re too far off to see if they’re Crows. Is this the cave?” They’d reached the asphodels.

“I’ll go first,” said Pirra. Squirming through the cave mouth, she dropped onto the stones. Fear squeezed her heart. She pictured ships beached in the bay and men splashing ashore. Her mother was relentless; she would search the whole island…

“Catch!” Hylas tossed in the waterskins, then jumped down beside her.

He’d brought two sticks of giant fennel, which he’d lit at the campfire. Pirra was astonished at his forethought, and even more that he didn’t seem scared of the cave. To her, the uncertain light only deepened the darkness around her. For all she knew, ghosts were all around them, thronging this shadowy pathway between the worlds of the living and the dead. Didn’t Hylas feel it too?

He was prowling about,
peering into cracks, and kneeling to taste the black water sliding past their feet. “This is good,” he muttered. “We could hide in here for days.”

“No we couldn’t,” she said quickly. “It’s too small, there’s not enough air.”

“Yes there is, there’s a draft.” He sniffed. “Smells salty. Must be a way to the Sea.” He snapped his fingers. “I just remembered, when I first got to the island I saw a cave, it opened straight onto the Sea. That’s where the air’s coming from.”

“Hylas—”

He was poking his head through a gap between two tall pillars of dank rock. “Think I’ve found it.” Before Pirra could stop him, he’d squeezed sideways and disappeared.

“Hylas!”
she hissed.

“Come on, it widens out!”

Setting her teeth, she squeezed after him.

She burst through into a narrow cave that was too low to stand up in, and clammy with breath. “We’ll get lost!” she panted.

“No, we won’t. Just remember those tall rocks near the entrance, and that red rock like a hand we passed at the turn—”

“But why go deeper at all?”

“Because we need to see those ships. If we can’t, we won’t know if they’ve gone, or if they’re heading straight for us…” His voice grew fainter as he rounded a bend.

Gasping for breath, Pirra followed him at a crouching run. In the wavering light of her fennel stalk, rock faces
sprang at her, and shadows slithered away. She heard the echoing
plink
of water—and behind it the impenetrable silence of stone.

Something brushed her ankle. She stifled a cry.

It was a garland, so ancient and shriveled that when she nudged it with her sandal it crumbled to dust. Her hand crept to her sealstone. The walls threw back the sound of her fear. In the gloom, she made out brittle twists of barley from summers long gone, and olive leaves as gray as death. Others had been here before her. She thought of the Vanished Ones: the people who had lived on the island in the old times, and mysteriously disappeared.

Here and there, she glimpsed lesser offerings pushed into cracks and crevices: a tiny earthenware bird, a bull, a snake. On Keftiu, people did the same thing, journeying to sanctuaries on peaks and in caves to leave the first fruits of the harvest, and little wild creatures of clay or bronze.

She glimpsed a small clay dolphin on a ledge. It lay on its side, its painted eye faded with age, yet curiously alert.

Ahead, Hylas’ light had dwindled to a glimmer.

Pirra righted the dolphin on its ledge, and hurried after him.

Being stuck on the island had been very terrible, and the dolphin would never have gone near it again if it hadn’t been for his pod. They were lost somewhere inside it, and he could tell by their squeals that they were getting weaker.

And now the island had swallowed the boy and the girl too.

The dolphin couldn’t abandon them. It wasn’t only that they’d rescued him. More than any humans he’d ever met, he cared about them. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.

Especially to the boy. Even when the boy was busy, he would always pat the waves with his flipper when the dolphin was near; and when the dolphin swam closer, the boy would stroke him and talk to him in his odd, pebbly speech.

Sometimes too, when the Above had gone dark and the girl was asleep, the boy would wander down and stand quietly in the shallows, and the dolphin would swim around him. Then there would be no need for speech, and boy and dolphin could be lonely together, both missing their kin.

But how dreadful to be human! To be forced to live in that terrible, glaring heat! No waving forests of cool green kelp where the succulent bream swim. No deep, dark hunting grounds where you must click hard and fast to find the stingrays hiding under the sand. It made the dolphin long to grab the boy by the flipper and dive with him, down through the shimmering Blue to the Black Beneath, to show him what it is to
be
a dolphin, at one with the Sea.

This was why the dolphin had to stay near the island: He was tied to it by a tangle of worry, pity, and love. He had to find his pod, and he had to look after the humans.

But
why
had they disappeared into that hole?

The dolphin had known for a while that both the boy and the girl were hiding from someone, because often they stared at the Sea, and he felt their fear crackling through the water. He’d guessed that they were hiding from other humans, and now he knew he was right, because when he’d warned the boy about the floating trees, he’d fled.

But why hide in a hole, like a pair of eels? And why in
that,
of all possible holes?

That was the hole that led to the Place of Singing Echoes. Every dolphin knew of it, but none had ever been there. It was not a place for dolphins; or for humans either. It was a place for the singing echoes and the poor, thin ghosts—and at times, for the Shining One Herself.

As the dolphin rode the tricky currents outside the cave, he wondered what to do. From deep within the island he caught the humans’ muffled voices. What were they doing so far in? Didn’t they know how dangerous it was?

The sky was turning a deeper blue. Soon it would be dark. And still the dolphin swam, straining to catch their voices.

Suddenly he became aware of a new threat. He felt it in his fins and in an ache along his lower jaw. He began to be afraid.

Someone was angry. And when He was angry, He slammed the Sea with His enormous tail, and brought whole mountains crashing down.

Above all else, the dolphin feared Him.

The One Beneath.

“There!” whispered Hylas at Pirra’s shoulder. “Two ships. D’you see?”

She nodded.

After the darkness of the cave, it had been wonderful to emerge into this big rocky chamber that opened onto the Sea. It hadn’t been easy to get to, because an underground stream flowed through it, which meant they’d had to edge sideways against the walls, in constant danger of falling in. When at last they’d reached the cave mouth, they’d seen Spirit swimming up and down, clacking his jaws. He’d seemed agitated; Hylas couldn’t tell if it was because of the ships, or something else. Pirra had scarcely noticed. As her heartbeats slowed, she’d taken hungry gulps of salty air.

Beside her, Hylas blew out a long breath. “They’re smaller than when I first saw them. They’re moving away.”

Shading her eyes against the Sun’s red glare, Pirra squinted at the specks on the horizon. Relief washed over her. “They’re not Keftian,” she said.

“How can you tell?”

“Sails are the wrong color, ships’ noses the wrong shape.”

“You can see all that? You must have the eyes of a hawk.”

“They’re not Crows either. I think—I think they’re Phoenician.”

“How come you know so much about ships if you’ve never been anywhere?” He sounded suspicious.

“Because,” she snapped, “the House of the Goddess is
covered in paintings, and lots are of ships from all over the world—Makedonia, Akea, the Obsidian Isles, Phoenicia, Egypt—and I’ve had nothing to do since I was about three summers old but stare at them and get very familiar with what they look like.”

A wave crashed against the rocks and they recoiled, shielding their fennel stalks from the spray.

“We’d better get moving,” said Hylas.

Pirra glanced anxiously behind her, where the cave mouth gaped, waiting to swallow them. “Can’t we find another way back?”

“How?” He pointed at the sheer cliffs above them and the Sea crashing against the rocks on either side. “If we tried to swim for it we’d be smashed to pieces. Although you’d probably drown first.”

There was nothing for it but to plunge once more into the cold and the dark. And it was darker this time, because their fennel stalks were nearly spent.

Pirra told herself grimly that she’d done it before, so she could do it again; but as the voice of the Sea fell away, she was shocked to see that the outside world had already dwindled to a pallid disc of light. Then she rounded a bend and it was gone.

There was no Hylas up ahead.

“Hylas?” she called.

Nothing but the drip, drip of water and her own urgent breath.

“Hylas!”

A sound of running—then light flared and there he was, looking strangely excited. “I found another cave,” he panted. “It’s a perfect hiding place, we can camp there for the night!”