The Seven Gifts (15 page)

He took one last long look at the garden, a
blaze of colour and cheer amidst the desolate, smoking landscape.
It was a nice garden, he thought; who would have believed it could
cause so much trouble. He hoped it would be alright without him. He
experienced a slight twinge of conscience at leaving it; and almost
began to feel that he could be persuaded to stay.

But a sudden rumbling noise from the ashes
of the palace persuaded him otherwise. George turned and fled, just
as a strange-looking object, that a musician would have recognised
as a psychological synthesizer, pushed its ungainly way into the
thick, dust-laden daylight. If Coalhole Custer's band really was
coming back, George did not want to see it.

The old gardener did not stop running until
he reached the coast, where he shipped aboard the first vessel he
saw that was bound for foreign lands.

“Anywhere!" he panted, when the Master asked
him where he was headed. “Fine," said the Master. “That's where we
are going."

So the old man of the land took to the sea.
And the clean salt air slowly healed the wounds in his heart, and
cleansed his soul of the hurt and hate and anger seared into it by
the things he had seen.

More there may have been to what he had seen
than the old man saw. But he was a simple soul, and saw only
through his eyes.

Later that night, feeling a
little calmer, he stood on the bridge with the Master as the old
steamship
Malachi Jones
rolled and rattled her way slowly south, searching for a
peaceful harbour far from the ravaged ruins of the Snow Queen's
realm. It was a wild, black night, unrelieved by stars or moon. The
ship, weary from too many years plodding the seas, wallowed badly,
lurching into the waves and shattering them into gleaming sheets of
spray that hammered on the bridge windows.

The Master, tall and thin, taciturn at the
best of times, was gloomy.

“There's evil about," he muttered to George
through the pipe he had clenched tightly between his teeth. “I can
smell it in the air."

George shuddered. He had come to sea to get
away from that sort of thing.

The Master looked at him sideways. “That
weed's not following you, is it?" He spoke tentatively.

George laughed nervously, and glanced over
his shoulder. “Don't be ridiculous," he said. But he felt uneasy.
He shook his head to try and banish the thoughts that now welled up
in his brain. The weed had left him alone. Why should it follow him
now? All the same, he peered round in the darkness, the hairs
crawling on the back of his neck.

“I don't like it,” said the Master. And at
that moment the two of them were rooted by a long, drawn-out,
almost bestial scream from somewhere on the poopdeck. As one they
whipped round and stared through the after bridge window into the
darkness.

But around the stern of the ship it was no
longer dark. A strange green light lit up the whole of the poop,
and the two men could see a sailor there, crouched on his knees
with his hands over his head. Towering above him, and way above the
after cargo mast, swaying at the end of a long reptilian neck was a
head. Perhaps twice the size of the wheelhouse and oval-shaped like
that of a serpent, it glowed bright green, pulsating around a
single eye that blazed with the ferocity of a red-hot coal. Above
the eye, and clearly visible in the green light that shone around
the beast's head, rested a crown of tiny flowers, each one as black
as the surrounding night.

George fainted.

The Master stared for what seemed a very
long moment, then leapt to the engine room voice-pipe. He wrenched
out the bung and yelled down to the engineer: “Full speed, Jimmy!
Everything you've got. There's a bloody monster up here; sea
serpent or kraken or something. For God's sake give her the
gun!"

He looked back astern over his shoulder, but
the beast had not moved. It just hung its great head about fifty
feet above the ship, and seemed to watch them. The Master began to
shake, then he ran to the wheel and bellowed into a microphone.

“All hands to the bridge. Emergency
Stations. Emergency Stations. All hands to the bridge. Bosun -
break out the small arms; report to the Master."

The old
Malachi Jones
strained and heaved and
shook as the engineer stoked up his boilers for all the speed he
could get. And sailors appeared from all over the ship, running for
the bridge with rifles and shotguns.

Then another glowing head appeared, on the
port side of the ship. It was identical to the first, even to the
crown of tiny black flowers. And another appeared on the starboard
side, then two more.

By the time all hands were gathered in the
wheelhouse the ship was surrounded by a circle of seven huge green
heads, all identical, all with crowns of tiny black flowers. And
each one just swayed way up above the ship, staring down as though
bemused by what it saw. Or perhaps still looking for what it
sought.

None of the heads made any sound, and all
seemed to sway in unison, as though they belonged to one single
monstrous creature.

Heaven preserve us, thought the Master; it
must be ten times the size of the ship. If it attacked them, they
were all dead. What was it doing?

For fully half an hour it
did nothing, except keep station with the
Malachi Jones
and peer down on her,
with all its seven heads. The ship was bathed completely in the
eerie green light, and the sailors clustered terrified in the
wheelhouse, clutching their clearly inadequate weapons.

What in heaven's name is it waiting for? the
Master wondered. Then George came to. Still groggy, and with no
recollection of why he had fainted, he stood up. And the nearest
head jabbed viciously at the wheelhouse.

There was a rending crash as wood and glass
shattered and splintered, and screams came from the sailors diving
for cover. A long slimy tongue, forked at the end like a snake's,
licked out and curled round George's body. Then its head came down,
and the great eye, blazing like a furnace, peered into the
wheelhouse as though inspecting the old gardener.

It hung for a moment. And the Master seized
his chance. He grabbed a large rocket flare, aimed it straight into
the eye, and yanked the firing pin.

There was a shattering explosion and a
shower of sparks filled the wheelhouse. The beast's head jerked up
with a bellow that blew the remnants of the wheelhouse roof right
out into the sea; and it dropped George.

My God, thought the Master, it's after the
old man. He looked round frantically. George was sprawled in a
corner clutching his head, and the Master could see another tongue
snaking out towards him.

In one bound he was across the bridge. He
grabbed George by the shoulders and practically threw him down the
companionway to the radio shack.

“Lock him up!" he yelled at the petrified
radio operator.

George fell to his knees on the floor of the
tiny, steel-clad room. As seven reptilian heads crashed into the
broken wheelhouse in a desperate bid to seek him out, he put his
hands together and prayed with all his heart and soul to the Old
Wise Woman to deliver them from this evil.

Amidst all the panic and screams, and the
crash of firearms and flares, no-one noticed the dense cloud
suddenly break apart over to the south-west. It revealed a round
glistening full moon, that threw a path of light across the sea
towards the troubled ship. In the light, racing towards them was a
dolphin: a pure white dolphin that shone like a leaping halo as it
bounded down the streaming silver pathway of moonlight.

The Master was the first to see it,
clambering to his feet as the beast withdrew its heads on failing
to find George. Why don't I just throw him overboard? he was
thinking, then perhaps this damned thing will leave us alone.

Then he saw the white
dolphin. The Master of the
Malachi
Jones
, like most experienced seamen, had
grown up with the legend of the white dolphin, which was reputed to
appear at times when a ship was in great distress, and then guide
it to safety. The Master knew nothing of the origins of this tale,
nor the reasons for the dolphin's rumoured behaviour, but deep in
the recesses of his mind the ancient race memory of his breed awoke
at the familiar sight of the dolphin surging through dark seas
towards a stricken ship. If the Master could have tuned in to this
memory he would have seen the very first stirrings of the legend
begin to form.

He would have seen circling way above a
small, lonely white dolphin a Fairy Tern, which was a small white
bird, rather delicate in appearance with long pointed wings, to
whom everything was possible and all things had meaning. She had
been following the solitary white dolphin for some days now as he
ploughed his lonely way through the cold southern seas, and she
listened to his thoughts - the ones he understood; and also the
ones he did not.

They were strange thoughts for a dolphin:
thoughts that had so perturbed his peers they had cast him out of
the school to wander the seas alone, disturbing the balance of only
himself.

And so he roamed, sensing somewhere a
solution to the troubles that seemed to be all his thoughts brought
him; searching endlessly within himself and without for the tiniest
clue as to where those thoughts might lead.

The more he searched the more he learnt; and
the less he seemed to understand. As each piece clicked into place
in the puzzle, so the final picture seemed to recede a little
further, into the depths where perhaps a dolphin's thoughts should
not go.

His confusion turned gradually to
bewilderment: then despair; and finally fear as the conflicting
images whirled into a crescendo of doubts that the little dolphin's
brain seemed incapable of containing.

Yet he clung still, to the train of thought
that he knew must ultimately lead him from the dark tunnel into
light. And as he struggled with the demons that would hold him in
the darkness, the depth, intensity and sincerity of his anguish
drew to him the Fairy Tern.

For six days and six nights she followed the
stricken young dolphin but did nothing, save perhaps test his
resolve. And on the seventh day, although he was never to know it,
he was no longer alone.

But he sensed something: an easing of the
tension perhaps; a semblance of clarity creeping into his thoughts.
There was no great revelation, but for some unaccountable reason he
felt calmer. The fog that filled his brain seemed to clear a
little, and he began vaguely to see some sort of way ahead.

And what he saw, as the Fairy Tern circled
lazily far above him, was a small sailing ship crossing ahead of
his path.

In itself, this was of no great import. He
had seen ships before and knew they were sailed by men. And he knew
something of men, from the tales of his elders - legends and
stories of a certain inexplicable relationship that seemed to exist
between them and dolphins. No-one knew why or when the relationship
had begun, but their history was filled with stories of both
creatures working together to catch fish; and also tales of
dolphins rescuing men from the sea - which was to them an alien
environment.

He had never thought much about this before,
but suddenly, now, the whole curious business seemed to fill his
head with anomalies and unresolved questions. And as he pondered on
this strangeness, he realised that something was niggling at the
back of his brain. Something to do with that sailing ship ahead.
Where was it going, he wondered?

Idly he checked its course with his sonar.
As it registered, he felt his body stiffen, his nerves jangling.
Casting aside his musings, he double-checked the course, then
carefully probed the waters out ahead of the ship. She was running
straight towards a jagged reef close beneath the surface. He had to
warn the sailors.

The little white dolphin, all confusion
gone, fairly flew through the water towards the endangered ship. He
circled it close at great speed, leaping constantly from the water
in an attempt to attract attention.

A small knot of sailors soon gathered at the
rail to watch the unusual sight of a pure white dolphin cavorting
like a mad thing around their ship. They were used to dolphins
swimming ahead of them, diving deep in the night to leave glowing
tunnels of phosphorescence in the water behind them; interwoven in
magic trails of light about the ship's course. They were said by
some to bring storms when they leapt high in the daytime, but
sailors liked dolphins. They sensed, perhaps, this curious
relationship.

However, none of these sailors had ever seen
a white dolphin before, nor one that leapt around so wildly as this
one, and they stared in fascination, cheering him on.

But when the dolphin began swimming
purposefully ahead of the ship, then suddenly turning to starboard,
repeating the manoeuvre time and again, an old Able Seaman sensed
something amiss and ran for the Captain.

The Captain, who was a very experienced
seaman, took one look at the dolphin's antics and ordered the wheel
put hard to starboard. He had seen this behaviour before, and knew
one fellow master who had wrecked his ship through ignoring it.

The moment the ship altered to a safe
course, the dolphin leapt high in the air, landing flat on the
water with a colossal splash. Then he swam rapidly back and forth
along the ship's new track, porpoising smoothly to indicate to the
watching sailors that all was now well.

The Captain waved his thanks to the white
dolphin, then returned to the chartroom to check his position; but
the other sailors remained at the rail, waving and cheering till
the warmth of their feelings flowed right across the water and into
the dolphin's now tired body.