The Sword of Feimhin (48 page)

Kate's feet had been taken from under her by the swell of ocean pouring through the cavern. The roar of the current filled her ears. So violent was the upsurge that it was tearing rocks out of the walls and hurling them headlong into the waves. A huge boulder was carried through the stream in Kate's direction, missing her by just a few feet. Her vision blurred and her mouth and nostrils filled with brine.

A claw, hard as a grappling hook, grabbed her by the hair, and she felt herself lifted and hauled through the onrushing torrent. The warrior was still looking after her. She felt the power in his armoured arm and saw the webbed fingers of his free hand pedalling through the ocean. The water had completely filled up the chamber of the Momu and was now pouring through the tunnels discovered by Granny Dew.

There were intervals of a second or two when she managed to snatch a breath before she found herself beneath the turbulent water again.

She was not alone. The water around her seethed with the same darting movement and rapacious feeding she had seen in the birthing pool. The Milawi! Their same frenzy of movement and excited hunting was accompanying her. Even in the bewildering nightmare of seething water Kate heard other sound: a hint of something lovely, a fairytale tinkling.

The advancing swell carried her into a huge cavern, vastly bigger than the chamber of the Momu, and the expansion was so broad and rapid that the depth of the water fell instantly. Kate felt her feet touch the bottom and for a few seconds she and the guard were able to stand, however buffeted by the rising tide. In the distance, through the green light of her own oraculum, she could make out the triangular figure of Granny Dew demanding a continuing channel through the rocks with thunderous raps of her staff of power. Kate heard her muttering words in the language of beginning, weaving a continuous, ongoing spell. Kate was exhausted by the effort of keeping her face out of the water. She had hardly recovered from her ordeal within the roots of the One Tree and now her face and her fingers, all felt numb with the freezing cold. Blinking to try to clear her vision, she used the light of her oraculum to look around. The cavern was even vaster than what she had thought from her initial impression,
and so spacious both horizontally and vertically that the light of her oraculum petered out without reaching the ceiling or the distant walls. The floor immediately in front of her was littered with rocks, both large and small. Then she jerked as the surface level of the water rose again to her chest and she was unbalanced by a new swell of incoming flood, held upright by the warrior alone. His ungainly head was swivelling from side to side and his iron-cold eyes stared at the surrounding walls. His nostrils moved as he sniffed the air. Some of Kate's hair was caught up in his lobster-like claw, with its curved, overlapping blades.

Then Kate felt a sudden release.

Shaami was by her side, his hands reaching out for hers. Numbed as her skin had become she could still feel the strangeness of the absence of nails on the webbed fingers shaped for swimming. The flesh of his hands now became even softer and more gentle, a gesture of friendship. The incoming deluge was continuing, the roar of the pressure coming from deep below the surface, But Shaami was looking around the cavern with the same interest as the warrior. Kate followed his eyes to the nearby walls, which were unnaturally smooth. In the pallid light of her oraculum she thought there might even be carvings within them, and natural shapes – a suggestion of stars and prickly things, of fronds moving with the current.

‘Shaami, what is this place?'

‘I think it may have been the first refuge of the Ancestors.'

Kate heard the awe in Shaami's voice. ‘What do you mean? A hiding place?'

‘Where they first fled the ravages of the Great Witch. Our home before the construction of Ulla Quemar.'

‘What a discovery!'

‘See – the histories – they are written on the walls.'

His eyes were better adapted to the dark than hers. Kate could make out very little other than the size of the chamber and the suggestions of patterns.

‘What a pity it will all be lost to the ocean.'

‘No, Greeneyes! You do not understand.'

Shaami's eyes were open wide, glowing with wonder. ‘What does it matter to us if the ocean fills the chamber? We inhabit both tide and shore. We shall return here to cherish this place.'

She had forgotten that, for Shaami, home was as much the sea as the land, yet it could hardly be accidental that they had found their way into this place. Kate realised that Granny Dew must have cleaved her path through the rock with the express purpose of arriving here.

Even as she reflected on this, the enormous chamber continued to fill with seawater. Kate feared that the eruption from the deep would begin again. It might not matter to the Cill, who could breathe underwater, but it might drown Kate herself. She heard a thunderous crack. The rock beneath her shook so violently she was thrown down onto her knees, her mouth barely above water. Then sunlight flooded the gigantic cavern, pouring in like a new incoming
tide around a distant corner, and with it arrived a new stream of warmer water. Water that surged in to meet the colder stream of deeper ocean, the union accompanied by an altogether recognisable and welcome sound – the wash of tide over a beach.

Shaami's head disappeared under the surface, as if he was overwhelmed at the arrival of daylight.

Kate could now make out the walls and contents of the cavern much more clearly. High above her she could see huge stalactites of many different sizes and colours. All around her she saw the rippling streams of surface- and deep-water rush together in wavelets and foam. The level of water stabilised around Kate's lower chest, but the floor of the complex cavern had different levels. In some of the more peripheral areas, the floor was a foot or more out of the water. But there were glimpses of a more coherent structure. In places, particularly on the higher plateaus of rock, she saw broken-off sections of what might once have been the walls of buildings. Bit by bit her exhausted mind put things together. Some remnants of walls had the organic shapes of starfish or sea urchins, other fragments had the shiny surfaces of sea shells, such as periwinkles, clams or nautili. Buildings, like those she had so admired in Ulla Quemar, that took their inspiration from the organic shapes and creatures of the sea-shore …

Kate squealed.

Beneath the surface she felt many gentle nibbles against her skin. And when she ducked her head below the surface,
in the dappled shadows she saw the shapes and colours of eyes.

A thrill of something wonderful and impossible was racing through her, causing her pulse to rise to giddy heights.

On a sudden impulse she dived under the rippling surface and swam among them. The Milawi were everywhere, darting to and fro. Her oraculum pulsed brightly, in tune with her astonishment. In its light she made out tentacles and circular mouths ringed with tiny, finely-barbed teeth. She could see hearts – three separate hearts beating within a single, semi-translucent chest wall, then there was a spreading circulation of blue blood within the same small body. In the moment or two that she beheld it, she glimpsed how bright that blood became. It was the iridescent blue of a clear Italian sky when leaving the three hearts, and the deep blue of the sky over the Comeragh Mountains at midnight when it returned. On the heads of others, of many more than she could possibly have hoped for, she saw the wide radial fans of the gills, and luminous turquoise eyes of the Cill. They were looking back at her, irising their slow expansions and contractions of friendship, while shoaling around her. Kate realised that she was the entire focus of their attention. They darted to and fro around her with a jet-like locomotion by squeezing water through the ring of their tentacles. They brushed against her, touching her skin with those tentacles and nibbling at her with sharp-toothed mouths.

Kate's heart was bursting with excitement.

Of course, she had known all along that the Cill weren't mammals. She hadn't expected them to bring babies into the world, like humans. Now she knew that, like a great many marine creatures, the Cill's egg were fertilised in the wilds of the oceans. The Milawi were their hatchlings; feeding embryos! She was so mesmerised by the realisation that she had almost forgotten her need to breathe. She surfaced, whooping. Shaami put his arm around her, supporting her until she had recovered her breath and until her pounding heart had settled closer to normal. He pressed her forwards, helping her towards the light. They were surrounded by half-a-dozen warriors whose presence wasn't threatening, as she now realised. They were there to take care of her and him – to protect the miracle of what was about to happen.

*

It was a happy shrieking sound, the sing-song of children's voices, that woke her. Kate sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, to look out onto a landscape full of sea and sky and sunshine. She was sitting in the shade of a pine tree, resting in a nest of feathery soft needles. The shrieking voices drew her attention down to the meeting of tide and blindingly white sand, where a large rounded hump was
making its ponderous way out into the shallows. Kate's eyes followed the dimples of its tread on the sand, running from where the gigantic turtle had laid its eggs to the shoreline, where a melée of naked bodies were climbing excitedly over its slow-moving hummock. The melodious sing-song chatter of what could only be Cill children melded gracefully with the sweep of the waves over the shore and the breath of wind in the branches over her head.

Kate felt so refreshed she might have been asleep for a year and a day. And she was no longer naked. She lifted the hem of her ankle-length diaphanous silk dress, which matched the green of her eyes. Underneath the silk she discovered the softest, lightest white cotton undergarments. Her mind was a confusion of happiness and disappointment. Disappointment because she had slept through the evolution of Milawi to what, for want of a better term, were now infants, or at least the Cill equivalents.

‘Shaami – it's paradise.'

‘A paradise, beloved Greeneyes, where we can languish in the tide and turn our faces to the sun for the first time in many thousands of years!'

Kate enjoyed walking through the soft warm sand to the water's edge, following the dimpled trail made by the turtle, to gaze out over the lagoon with its scattered islands of palm. The unmistakable shape of a sunstealer caught her eye, making a suspiciously rapid movement through the surf in her direction. She pretended to be surprised as
a cluster of six or seven children broke the surface, their excited faces erupting from the water, those beautiful turquoise eyes staring up at her.

‘Momu! Momu!'

Shaami smiled. ‘They call you Momu in their song of welcome. It is the greatest honour my people could bestow on you.'

‘How lovely!'

She saw gill rays retract over the domes of their heads, reduced to tattoos of stubbly lines, as they clambered out of the water. All around her, more and more of the children were emerging from the lagoon. One of the last to break the surface was a figure much taller than the others. The young Momu emerged with a slow and gentle grace under the watchful protection of the warriors. She clasped the pulsating crystal in her cupped hands, light spilling out between her long and delicate webbed fingers. Those gorgeous mother-of-pearl eyes irised slowly open and then closed. The children surrounded Kate and the new Momu, hugging them.

‘Who will teach them the arts they once knew?'

‘All that was known will be recovered from the crystal.'

Kate recalled the terrifying circumstances in which she had first met Shaami. His delicate body had trembled with terror in the clutches of the Great Witch, Olc, in her Tower of Bones. Kate had saved him from being sacrificed to the furnace of the rising titan, Fangorath. Now Shaami had become the elder of his people.

She closed her eyes and heard an unexpected whisper, mind-to-mind.

‘Elaru?'

Kate struggled to take it all in.

‘What will become of you now? Will you have to go back to partnering that monster, Urale?'

‘I forgive you, Elaru.'

As the presence of the succubus faded, Kate was silent for several moments, gazing into the distance, her thoughts confused. She had spoken aloud, but Shaami could not have heard her mental answers from Elaru. He must be wondering what to make of her.

‘Have you decided on a name for your new home?'

‘Ulla Moimari – the City of Beach and Tide,' he said.

‘It's a lovely name.' Kate hugged him for several long seconds, and then she hugged the young Momu.

‘Then you are leaving us already?'

‘I have called the dragon Driftwood. I must go with him
without delay. The Great Witch is gone, but the danger is not over. I must return to join my friends, Alan and Mo.'

They sang to her then, amid the beauty of the coral bay, and it sounded like fairy music. It was as if she were listening to the weave of nature; the delight of the flight of a butterfly, the soar of swallows when they came to signal that summer had arrived, the leap of salmon in the choppy rivers that led to their homes, the fecund, glorious warmth of summer. It was so lovely it broke her heart not to stay, to lie in the warm briny swell of Ulla Moimari and stare into the sky at the passing clouds and simply glory in the wonder of it all.