Sea. Sarah Driver

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СКАЧАТЬ I done it to avenge Grandpa, and to keep us safe! And it’s barely sundown. I’ll be thirteen tomorrow night! Sparrow’s eight and he ent even asleep yet!’ I splutter and almost choke on my words.

      A small smile tugs at Grandma’s mouth. ‘Never mind what your brother’s doing, though he should be snoring by now. We might have need of his voice again afore the sun wakes. Off to the privy, now, Sparrow.’

      ‘Yep, off you go,’ I say, smirking at my brother. ‘Just be watchful that bigtooth shark don’t leap up and bite your behind while you’re peeing.’

      Sparrow yelps and burrows deeper among the blankets. Grandma fixes me with her glass eye. Story goes, her eye went blind when she half turned to merwraith, when the ship of her childhood sank at the hands of wreckers and she nearly drowned. I stare back into its sea-green depths, hard and unblinking.

      All of a sudden the fierceness drops out of her face and she starts to chuckle. ‘Gods have mercy,’ she gasps after a moment, clutching her sides. ‘Sparrow, off t’ the privy ’n I’ll hear no more about it. Mouse, get yourself into your nightclothes. You’re to get to bed, and stay put whilst I tend to my injured.’

      She turns and clomps up the stairs, herding Sparrow before her. ‘My hide’s much too ancient for all this child-rearing caper,’ she exclaims. ‘Not enough that I’m captain and medsin-maker and—’ her grumblings fade as she disappears through the hatch.

      I strip to my smallclothes, dry myself with a scrap of linen and wriggle into my nightshirt. One of my fingers is grazed raw from my bowstring, so I lick it clean and dab it with Grandma’s ointment. When I scoot onto our bunk and prop open the porthole the night rings with the siiigh and shhhhh of whales breathing.

      In the sky, the great green fire spirits dance and ripple, stretching far away into the distance. Grandma says their pictures are gifts, to show us what will come and what has been. She says they showed our Tribe that I’d be a captain, before I was even born. At Sparrow’s birth the spirits said he’d be a whale-singer – and sure enough, he was singing before he could talk. I search for some sign of Da among the fire spirits as they flicker with life. But there’s naught of him there and my heart aches with it. ‘Da?’ I whisper.

      Sparrow clatters back down the steps into the cabin. ‘You ent gonna see Da up there. He’s waiting with the land-lurkers.’ He jabs me in the ribs with his elbow to make me budge up on the bunk. I’m about to elbow him back when I see the way his hair sticks up in a nest cos I ent got round to brushing it today.

      ‘You better fetch that brush from—’

      ‘Shhh!’ hisses Sparrow. He bounces up on tiptoe and grabs the edge of the porthole to peer out.

      A knot of women pass along the storm-deck, right below us. ‘Carpenters,’ I whisper, cos I can hear the little silver hammers on their belts chiming as they lug wood to patch some of the damage to the Huntress.

      ‘Bleeding nippers running about, bringing troubles on us,’ says one. ‘They should be kept below when the beasts come near! Captain’s granddaughter or no, it can’t go on!’

      ‘Aye, she could’ve scuppered us! We’ve a long night ahead.’

      Me and Sparrow stare at each other. ‘I was just trying to keep our Tribe safe, and this is the heart-thanks I get?’

      ‘I’m cold.’ Sparrow pulls the porthole closed with a bang. ‘Who cares about the stupid carpenters? Can I have a story?’ he begs. He plops himself down amongst the bed-furs and wriggles his hand under the pillow to search out a crispy old starfish.

      I sigh. ‘Crafty little bargainer, ent you?’ I shut one eye and squint at him. ‘All right. Just one.’

      He pulls off a starfish arm and shoves it into his mouth. ‘No sky-monsters! And no stogs – Thunderbolt hates all giants cos they gobble up sprites and spit out their wings.’ The moonsprite hops about inside her glass bottle, making a tiny thudding sound like a moth beating against a lantern.

      ‘Gods,’ I mutter, rooting around under the bunk to grab the long, smooth walrus tusk with the pictures of Sparrow’s favourite story etched into it. ‘Next you’ll be telling me you still believe in the ghost of Captain Rattlebones or—’

      ‘Don’t!’ Sparrow shrieks, face gone pale. ‘You’re only allowed to tell the story of the Storm-Opal Crown!’ He nestles in next to me, peering at the pictures in the tusk. His yellow hair smells like nutmeg and his feet are cold as stones.

      ‘Get them freezing planks off me!’ I move the tusk to catch Thunderbolt’s moonlight. ‘One hundred moons and suns ago, long after the first oarsman beat his drum, but while you was still just a puny sea-spark on the wind—’

      ‘I weren’t never!’

      ‘—the last King of Trianukka had a golden crown that got gobbled up by a great whale. Three powerful Storm-Opals were to be set in the ancient crown, to heal the trouble between all the Tribes of Sea, Sky and Land and let them live in peace together. The first Opal held a foam of sea, the second a fragment of sky, and the third a fracture of land. But after the crown was swallowed—’

      ‘Did it hurt?’ murmurs Sparrow sleepily, tracing the etched outline of the whale with a fingertip.

      ‘Did what hurt?’ I kick his cold feet away again.

      ‘Swallowing a crown?’ He belches and I waft away the starfish-stink.

      ‘Ugh! What do you think, clumber-brain? Anyway, the Opals had to be kept safe somehow, didn’t they? So the crinkled old mystiks of the Bony Isle guarded them, deep within the walls of Castle Whalesbane, where the last King dwelt.’

      I’m getting pulled into the thrill of the story, but Sparrow’s breath is soft with sleep, so I skip to the last bit and make it quick. ‘And he blamed the Sea-Tribe captain, Rattlebones, for hiding the crown in the whale’s belly, and that brought a hundred years of war, and gifted all the power to the land.’ My voice trails away. I run my finger across the etching of the first oarsman’s drum, then lean down and put the tusk back under our bunk.

      Soon Sparrow’s garbling in his sleep. The Huntress creaks and the wind wails loud enough to almost burst my brain. The whales keep up their moaning; I try to block out their song with my pillow but it’s too loud. Shouts drift from Grandma’s medsin-lab – must be she’s stitching a wound, and I know she’s run out of stingray venom for the numbing. ‘What are you, True-Tribe or land-lurker?’ comes her distant roar.

      When I hear her boots creaking down the steps to the cabin I turn towards the wall. I listen to her get ready for bed; taking out her glass eye, peeling off her armour. She flings off her boots but keeps her tunic and breeches on, in case she’s needed on deck.

      She clambers into bed and I think about calling out that I’m sorry about the terrodyl, but I don’t know how to start. I dig my toes into the mattress. She might tell me off if I wake up Sparrow, so I keep quiet, but then another thought makes me bite my tongue – nighttime’s always when I think of questions about Ma. Ma was Grandma’s own daughter, but we never talk about her. Oftentimes I’ve lain in my bunk and wanted to call across the cabin: do you miss her? Cos I do. That’s the only gap between me and Grandma. The missing Ma and not saying a thing about it.

      I open my mouth, turn over, but then Grandma’s walrus-snore starts rumbling so I shut my mouth and sigh.

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