The Dragon in the Sea (7 page)

“Not at all.” Yar pulled himself up tall. “I am a selkie, at your service, don’t you know?” he said.

“Selkie,” said Daisy, recalling her magical myths. “Don’t selkies lure humans into the sea?”

Yar chuckled. “Usually, it’s selkies who come up on land when they fall in love with humans. Sorry business, that, if you ask me, living the lubber life. Anyway, I am, as I say, chief mate of this vessel. Fluke, here, is acting captain. She’s been acting for so long, I daresay she’s got the part.” He laughed, a series of snorts that fizzed the water around his whiskers.

“Mmmmm,” said Fluke as she sucked in her seaweed like a little kid with spaghetti. “Do pardon me,” she said when she had finished. “I find tea by far the most savory repast of the day.”

Daisy nibbled at her tea weed. “Why
acting
?” she asked.

Yar said, “Captain Belleweather, our rightful captain, disappeared from the bridge years ago when the ship went down. Haven’t seen scale nor fin of our dashing captain since. Sadly, I can’t say
the same for Belleweather’s nemesis, Maldew the Mermage.”

“Well, Chief,” said Fluke, “we haven’t exactly
laid eyes
on him.”

“Don’t need to lay eyes on the villain to observe his nefarious hand at work, now, do we, Cap’n?” Yar said.

“Did you say
mermage
?” Daisy asked. “As in magician or wizard or enchanter?”

“Magician,” said Yar, “of the darkest order. His followers would say magnificently dark.”

“Black as an oil spill,” Fluke concurred grimly.

“Is Captain Belleweather a mermage, too?” Jesse asked.

“Actually,” Yar said, with a proud twirl of his whiskers, “Belleweather is one of us. A selkie, I don’t mind saying.”

“A selkie with formidable magical powers, Chief,” Fluke pointed out. “More powerful than anything or anyone in all Eight Seas.”

“Seven,” said Jesse.

“It’s eight, dear boy, and always has been,” said Fluke.

“All right,” said Jesse, bracing for a debate. “So if there are eight seas, like you say, what’s this eighth one called and where is it?”

Yar and Fluke exchanged a look.

“Should I tell him, Cap’n?” Yar said to Fluke.

“Go ahead, Chief,” said Fluke softly. “Tell him.”

Yar turned to Jesse. “Why, I should have thought it was obvious, lad,” he said. “The name of the eighth sea is … the Eighth Sea.”

“Well, technically,” put in Fluke, “it’s the Watery Realm … but we, as its denizens, have always called it the Eighth Sea.”

Yar went on. “And it happens to be the very sea in which you now find yourselves having sea tea from the Sargasso Sea with she and me. Did you hear that, Cap’n?” he said to Fluke with a rich snort. “I’m a poet!”

“Don’t I know it?” Fluke said fondly. “When you’ve finished your sea tea, we’ll take you on a tour of this grand vessel. We’re quite proud.”

“Justifiably, if I do say so,” said Yar.

Jesse and Daisy exchanged a dubious look.

“You
do
plan on remaining on board as our guests?” Fluke said. “It’s the only safe and civilized place to be in the Eighth.”

“Would you excuse us a moment?” Jesse asked his hosts as he drew Daisy aside. Emmy swam up between them, giving Daisy a start. Jesse whispered to them: “Look. There’s a chance the egg is on board this ship. We need to stay and search for it, right?”

“The egg has to be here,” said Daisy. “Because
that’s definitely the sea horse from yesterday.”

“Unless the water zombie got the egg,” Jesse said.

“My money’s on the kelpie,” Daisy said.

“Esss,” Emmy agreed.

“Did you guys get enough to eat?” Jesse asked. “I don’t know about you but it’s coming up on time for Thanksgiving dinner and my stomach’s feeling totally gypped.”

“Ine oo!” said Emmy, grinding her fangs.

Conference concluded, Jesse turned back to their hosts. “We’d love a tour and we’d love to stay,” he said. “But would you mind if we had seconds on the seaweed tea first?”

“How rude of us!” Fluke fussed. “We didn’t even offer. But of course you’re hungry from your long journey from … where did you say it was?”

“We didn’t,” said Daisy.

“Polly’s h—” Jesse started to say, but Daisy cut him off.

“Polly-
nesia
!” she said brightly.

“My, my,
my
,” Fluke said, shaking her mane, “you
have
swum a long way. No wonder you’re hungry.”

Just then, an electric eel darted past and halted next to Fluke. She reached out and touched it. The eel lit up and gave off a loud
zzzzzt
.

The door to the foredeck cabin swung open and a small, dark-tressed mermaid flitted out bearing a large blue china tureen. She glided around the table and refilled everyone’s cup.

Unlike the water zombies, this mergirl did not have green skin and red eyes. She had mocha-colored skin and soft brown eyes, her fingernails as clean as ten little pearls.

Daisy also noticed that, unlike the mermaids featured in cartoons, she did not have a seashell bikini top. However, like fairy-tale mermaids, her swirling chestnut hair was all that covered her upper body. Daisy was suddenly quite happy to be wearing her hoodie.

“Thank you, Star,” Fluke said.

Star bowed and swished back into the cabin.

“Star’s a real gem,” said Fluke with a contented sigh. “She’s our mer-maid.”

“We know all about mermaids,” Daisy said.

Jesse said, “I think what Fluke means is that Star is a mer-
maid
. Get it?”

“Oh!” said Daisy. “A
maid
!”

“And a hardworking one she is, too,” said Fluke. “She even swabs decks. It’s hard to find a mer-maid these days who will swab a deck. Some think it’s beneath them.”

“I rather think it is, Cap’n, being in the nature
of decks,” said Yar with a throaty chuckle. “Still, she is a most agreeable creature.”

Daisy said, “We met up with some merfolk earlier who didn’t seem very agreeable.”

Yar regarded her thoughtfully. “Did you, now? Red Eyes, most likely. A shame, that. I do apologize on behalf of the Eighth.”

Jesse raised an eyebrow at Daisy. If the water zombies—or the Red Eyes, as Yar called them—were the bad guys, then surely their hosts were the good guys. But Daisy looked as if she were still reserving judgment.

“Say, how about that tour?” said Yar.

Having finished their second helpings, the guests followed their hosts down to the poop deck, where the outlandish canopy still piqued their curiosity.

Emmy swam right up to the shell curtain and burrowed her head into a gap.

Jesse saw Fluke and Yar moving swiftly ahead with the tour. “No, Emmy! Not now!” he said. “We’ll look later.”

Suddenly, something huge and gray emerged from between the curtains and loomed over Emmy.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE
CAPTAIN BELLEWEATHER’S CABIN

Emmy pulled back, hissing, her back fin bristling like a scalded cat.

“Hammerhead!” Jesse gasped.

Four more hammerheads followed the first, pouring out, one by one, from between the shell
curtains like clowns from a car, only there was nothing funny about it.

“A whole
shiver
of hammerheads!” Jesse said shakily.

The sharks shook their broad, blunt snouts at Jesse and Daisy, their black eyes unfathomable and unblinking.

“Swim for your lives!” said Jesse.

Jesse and Daisy shot up toward the surface but the hammerheads cut them off. Two of them milled overhead and more blocked them on three sides, pinning them to the deck.

“What’ll we do now?” Daisy said in a frightened voice.

Emmy let out a long, low hiss.

“I have no idea,” Jesse said. “But I’m pretty sure hammerheads are man-eaters.”

“Don’t mind the hammers,” Yar said, swimming back and dispersing the sharks with a casual wave of his fin.

The hammerheads wheeled about and disappeared back beneath the canopy.

Daisy sagged against a rope locker. Just when she was starting to trust their hosts! “Aren’t they sort of dangerous to have around?” she asked.

“Intimidation is part of their job,” said Yar.

“What exactly
is
their job?” Daisy asked.

“Oh,” Yar said vaguely, “keeping the hooligans and the riffraff out.”

“Providing some muscle,” Fluke put in.

“
And
teeth,” Yar said.

“And cartilage, too,” said Jesse.

Daisy and Emmy nodded. Jesse, having been homeschooled by doctors, was a fund of miscellaneous information. He went on. “Sharks are cartilaginous fishes. The same material our noses are made of. A shark is like one big nose.”

“Sharks, skates, rays, dolphins, squid, octopi, crabs, eels, jellyfish, and fish of all colors, shapes, and sizes,” Yar said. “We welcome all and sundry aboard
The Golden Dragon
. You might say that we provide safe haven in a dangerous world.”

“Haven, my fat fin,” Jesse whispered to Daisy. “Those sharks are here to guard something important—you can bet on it.”

“Yeah, but how do we find out without becoming shark snacks?” Daisy whispered back.

“Ater,” Emmy said.

Jesse and Daisy agreed, nodding. “Later.”

Yar cleared his throat. “We’ll start the tour belowdecks,” he said. “I think you will find it quite impressive, if we do say so ourselves.”

Fluke lifted a hatch amidships and they swam down, following the rungs of a ladder nobody
needed. The deeper they went, the more brightly the lights along Emmy’s flanks shone, like the painted lines on a highway at night. At the bottom, there was a long, wide passageway, lit by phosphorescent seashell lanterns mounted on the bulkheads. On either side of the passageway, cabin doors extended fore and aft, seemingly into infinity.

“There must be hundreds of doors,” Jesse whispered in awe.

“Depending on the day,” Yar said.

“He can be most capricious,” said Fluke. “One day there’s a thousand doors. The next, a mere dozen.”

“He?”
said Jesse.

“Why, this vessel, of course,” said Fluke.
“The Golden Dragon.”

“Aren’t all ships shes?” Jesse asked.

“Not this ship,” Yar said. “Captain Belleweather made him a he and also made sure he was thoroughly magicked, from stem to stern. With the captain gone, the
Dragon’
s all we have left. Isn’t that so, Acting Cap’n?”

“Too true, Chief,” said Fluke.

The doors that had seemed identical at first glance turned out to be each quite different. The nearest one had bright pieces of coral inlaid to form a mosaic showing a school of yellow fish swimming
through an arch of cobalt blue coral.

“Beautiful door,” said Daisy.

“We call them portals, actually,” Yar said. “A door is just a door, isn’t it? A simple case of open and shut. But a portal, well, it’s something else altogether, don’t you know?”

One of Fluke’s short arms reached out and grasped the white coral knob with a tiny claw. The portal swung open.

Everyone blinked.

“Ah, yes, of course,” said Yar. “It’s daytime Down Under.”

Rays of golden sunlight shimmered through turquoise water that teemed with exotic fish, which Jesse pointed out and named from memory: unicorn fish, hawk fish, scorpion fish, parrot fish, and crab fish scuttling like spiders along the bright canyons of coral that throbbed with color—royal purple, hot pink, school-bus yellow, lime green.

“Is it real?” Daisy asked.

Yar nodded. “Oh, I should say so.”

“This would be the Great Barrier Reef,” said Fluke.

“That ought to do it for now, Cap’n, wouldn’t you say?” said Yar wearily, rubbing his eyes with a fin. “A little of the reef goes a long way, I find.”

Fluke closed the door and waited, giving her
guests a chance to adjust their vision to the much dimmer passageway.

“That was
excellent
!” said Jesse.

“Can we go back sometime?” Daisy asked.

“Certainly,” said Fluke.

Daisy pulled Emmy and Jesse aside. “It would be easy to hide a Thunder Egg in one of those coral canyons, don’t you think?” she whispered.

“Right,” Jesse whispered back. “But would they ever be able to find it again? The Great Barrier Reef is made up of over eight hundred individual coral islands and covers about one hundred fifty thousand square miles. It would take more than Belleweather’s magic to track that egg down if they hid it in there.”

Fluke and Yar were waiting for them at the next portal. If they were curious about their guests’ frequent need for private conferences, they didn’t betray it. This portal looked as if it had been carved out of blue ice. When Fluke opened it, they all braced themselves as a current of frigidly cold water enveloped them. It was like stepping from a hot summer’s day into an overly air-conditioned grocery store. In the bright, powdery blue water, a narwhal—unicorn of the deep—poked its corkscrew tusk into the underside of a pale blue shelf of arctic ice.

“Oo old or egg,” Emmy said.

“Too cold for the egg?” Daisy interpreted through shivering lips. “Then let’s hope it’s not in there.”

“This is a portal to the North Pole,” said Yar. “Close the door before we catch our deaths, Cap’n. I prefer the more tropical seas myself. Among many, we have portals to the other seven seas. No lakes, though, sorry to say. I do so like a good lake, don’t you, Fluke?”