The Crossing of Ingo

  I slept a little during the night. Seiliko and the other dolphins plunged on tirelessly, always heading westward. Sometimes they breached and we saw the night sky with a big golden moon and millions of stars. I looked up but I couldn’t recognise the constellations. All the stars were in the wrong places. A second later, we dived back through the skin.

  “Dawn will be here soon,” Seiliko says to me. She’s right. The darkness begins to thin. The sea takes on a tinge of grey. We breach again and the moon and stars have disappeared. Seiliko keeps close to the surface, skimming at speed, sending up plumes of spray. Exhilaration pours through me.

  “Sunrise!” says Seiliko. The sun explodes from the sea’s grey rim, flooding it with colour. The huge ball of the sun is scarlet, then gold, then a pulsing yellow so brilliant that my eyes hurt and I have to look away. Streaks of fire shoot across the sea’s surface. My face is bathed in flames.

  “Sunrise!” cry all the dolphins exultantly, thrashing their tails on the surface so that the spray catches rainbows. Seiliko gathers herself and leaps clear of the water, then crashes down. She’s going at full speed now, the others are falling back and I wish we could ride like this for ever.

  At that moment Seiliko throws herself sideways. The jolt hits me like an electric shock. I’m hurled forward, then back. I’m not part of her any more. My skin peels away from hers. The next moment I feel myself slipping. I scrabble to hold on but her skin is suddenly slippery. Seiliko bucks again and I pitch sideways. As I fall, I hear her high-pitched warning cry: “Nets! Nets! Nets!”

  I’m on the surface, pushing my hair out of my face. My lungs are burning. I’m not in Ingo any more. When you’re riding with a dolphin you stay in Ingo even when they breach, but now I’m on my own. I have to breathe, and the pain is so terrible that I would scream if I had enough breath. Immediately Seiliko is alongside me again. I can hardly see her through a haze of pain. It only lasts for a second and then I’m back in Seiliko’s protection. She eases herself under me, and I cling to her, exhausted, as Ingo flows back over me and into me. I don’t have to breathe any more. The pain ebbs and I can see clearly again.

  “Where are the others?”

  “Below us,” Seiliko reassures me. “They stopped before they hit the nets.”

  Seiliko plunges beneath the surface, and I see what she’s already seen. Loose nets hang swaying in the water. If we’d driven on at such speed, the nets would have tangled round us so tight we’d never have got out. Slowly, cautiously, the dolphins skirt the nets. There’s no sign of a boat. Maybe these nets have been abandoned, or ripped loose in a storm.

  There’s a shadow ahead of us in the water. Seiliko quickens her pace, then her body shudders to a stop. Her voice rises, keening. Behind us, the other dolphins respond with answering wails. My blood chills as I realise that the shape hanging from the net ahead of us is a dolphin.

  We come closer. It’s a young male dolphin, caught by his pectoral fins. He must have struggled and struggled until he drowned. There are gashes in his skin where the net has cut.

  The dead dolphin lies on his back. His mouth is slack and the eye that we can see looks milky.

  “He has not been dead long,” says Seiliko. Her voice is harsh with distress. “The fish have not come to him yet.”

  “Can we free him? Faro, could we cut the net?”

  “We have nothing to cut it with,” says Faro, staring at the dead dolphin.

  “Humans have been here,” says Seiliko as if that’s all there is to be said.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “You did not put the net here, Sapphire,” says Elvira.

  “But humans did.”

  The dead dolphin and the net sway a little in the current. I wish we could cut him free. If we had a knife or even a sharp shell …

  “His body understands that we can do nothing for it,” says Seiliko. “His spirit is free to ride the waves.”

  I wish I could believe that too. The dolphin lolls there, so dead and so helpless.

  “We must get away from this place,” says Seiliko.

  I’m glad to go, but I can’t help looking back over my shoulder until the dead dolphin becomes a shadow again, and then disappears.

  Seiliko knows where the sperm whales are. They were logging not far from what she calls the Great Land. One more day’s journey, she says, will take us there.

  Seiliko says nothing more about the dead dolphin, and nor does anyone else, but the memory of it hangs over us all. I’ve known for a long time about dolphins getting caught in nets and drowning there. But knowing is not the same as seeing it with your own eyes. I feel heavy, sad and responsible. The dolphins and Faro and Elvira don’t seem to blame us, but in their hearts maybe they do.

  The journey seems endless. I am longing for night to come so that I can sleep, and maybe then the image of the dead dolphin will leave my mind. The sun is low in the sky now, and it feels as if we’re travelling straight into the sunset. My eyes dazzle until I can hardly keep them open. Even Seiliko must be growing weary. I listen to the hiss of water curling away behind us, and to the scream of seabirds when we rise above the surface. I don’t really believe that we’re ever going to see land. The ocean stretches endlessly ahead of us, and endlessly behind …

  I must have fallen asleep. I open my eyes. We are logging on the surface. Swell moves beneath the skin of the water, and moonlight shines on the black humps of the three other dolphins. Everyone’s resting. Dolphins don’t sleep deeply; they drowse for half an hour or so, but on some level they’re always alert to danger. I’ve been asleep for a long time. I stretch one leg and then another. Water clucks softly around Seiliko’s body. I don’t want to wake her but I feel much too alert and alive myself to stay still. Maybe she won’t notice if I slip off her back and go and see if Conor’s awake. Stealthily, I slide one leg over Seiliko’s back.

  “Where are you going, Sapphire?” she asks me, her voice the quietest possible outbreath of clicks and whistles.

  “Oh! I thought you were asleep, Seiliko.” I raise my head to look around. Beyond the dark swell of the sea there is a more solid, opaque line. I stare, and as I watch a few lights open along it, like eyes. For a moment I can’t think what it is. A ship? A huge liner on its way across the world? A smell catches in the back of my throat, sharp, mineral and unmistakable. Land. I can smell land. Those lights are human lights.

  We must be close to shore. Not more than a few miles at most. There are people living there, in houses. How strange that seems after we’ve been so long in Ingo. Maybe children are going to bed in those houses at this moment.

  “Seiliko, I think I can see land.”

  Seiliko’s body tenses. “Where do you see it?”

  “Over there, ahead of us. Look at the lights.” Seiliko does not respond.

  “Can’t you see it?” I ask again. Suddenly I am seized with longing. “Seiliko, do you think that is the Great Land that you were talking about? My mother could be there. One of those lights could be shining from her window.”

  Still Seiliko says nothing. Maybe she’s angry because of the nets.

  “Could you take me there?” Seiliko could cross that stretch of water in a few minutes. We could be there and back again before the others woke. Imagine if Mum really was there, and I could see her and speak to her. Of course it’s crazy to believe that out of all the thousands of miles of Australian coast, those lights show the place where she is. It’s crazy but maybe this is one of those nights when the million to one chance comes true. Those lights are like a signal. Here I am. Here I am.

  I don’t care what Conor says, I know Mum isn’t going to die of shock if she sees me. She’d want to see me more than anything. There’s so little time. Tomorrow those lights will be gone. We’ll travel on and we might never come so close to the coast again. And I know deep in my heart that there’s danger waiting ahead. The closer we get to completing the Crossing, the closer we are to breaking Ervys’s dreams of power,
the greater that danger will grow. My Atka said, You must stay in your world and fight its battles. Ingo is my world. Ingo’s battles are my battles. If something happens to me – if Mum never sees me again –

  “Please, Seiliko!”

  If there’s the faintest chance of seeing Mum I’ve got to take it. It might be our only chance and there is something I must ask her. Deep inside me a question is forming, as huge and shadowy as a whale beneath the surface of the sea. I don’t know exactly what it is yet. I only know that those lights have appeared for a purpose and I’m not meant to ignore them.

  “I cannot take you,” says Seiliko.

  Her rejection sears through me. “But Seiliko …”

  “I cannot take you,” she repeats.

  “I’ve got to see my mother, Seiliko.”

  Seiliko doesn’t ask me why I think that Mum is there. She believes me, but she’s still not going to help me. “Then I will swim,” I say.

  “No,” says Seiliko, “that land is much farther away than you think.” I think I sense a change in her voice. Maybe she’s about to yield. At last she says reluctantly, “I cannot take you to land, Sapphire, but there is one who may be willing.”

  “A dolphin, you mean? Can you ask him for me? I’d be so grateful, Seiliko. You don’t know how important it is.”

  “If you are sure.”

  “Yes, yes, of course I’m sure.”

  “Then climb off my back.”

  I slide off Seiliko’s back and sink into the water, where I won’t have to breathe air. But if I go to shore I’ll have to breathe, and it will hurt …

  I’ll face that when I come to the shore.

  A soft, mysterious whistling fills the air, like drops of music. Seiliko is calling. The sound fills the water, spreading out in wider and wider ripples. It’s a sweet, wild, urgent sound. If I were a dolphin and I heard it, I’d have to come. I look up towards the surface of the water, but none of the other three dolphins or their riders has stirred. They still float on the surface as if they’re enchanted. Slowly the whistling fades away. Seiliko dips beneath the surface and says, “He is coming. Wait here and he will ride you to the shore. Don’t speak to him or ask him any questions and he will take you safely and return you safely. Promise me.”

  “I promise, Seiliko.”

  She melts into the shadows of the water. I wait tensely. I hear nothing, no clicks and whistles, no dolphin greeting, but suddenly the dolphin is at my side in a silent swirl of water. Moonlight streams on to the curve of his back. For a moment he looks transparent, like a trick of the light, and then I touch his flank and swim up on to his back and of course he is real and solid. But he doesn’t speak to me. He waits until I’m in position and have sealed myself against him, and then without warning he leaps forward.

  He is no faster than Seiliko but when he breaches he leaps even higher above the waves, so that he seems to hang in the air for seconds before diving so steeply that he enters the water with hardly a ripple. He dives deep, where the moonlight can’t reach, then up to the surface to skim it like a stone skipping across a lake. He doesn’t splash like the other dolphins. If I couldn’t feel the solid roundness of his body I would think he had no weight at all.

  I hear the thunder of swell breaking on a reef. I look ahead and see the white of foam where the water pounds. The dolphin doesn’t hesitate, but heads straight for the wild water. I brace myself, but before I’ve had time to be afraid he finds a gap and we slip through into the calm of a lagoon. The water is shallow here, and so transparent that I can see moonlit crabs scuttling on the sea bed beneath us. As I slide off the dolphin’s back, Faro’s words from long ago ring in my mind. As long as you are with the dolphins, you are in Ingo. My feet touch the sandy bed of the lagoon. The water is chest deep, and suddenly I’m aware that it’s warm. The dolphin slides away a couple of metres. Now I am in the Air. Now I’ve got to breathe. I brace myself, clenching my fists.

  But it doesn’t hurt. The air slides into my body easily. I can hardly believe it. Cautiously I take another breath and wait for the shock and pain of harsh air on my Ingo-smooth lungs, but my breath comes as easily as if I’ve never been in Ingo at all. A breeze caresses my face, carrying heavy, tropical sweetness. It reminds me of the palm trees in St Pirans when they come into flower, but the night here is much warmer than the hottest summer night in Cornwall. I look up. The night sky is rich blue velvet, and the stars are huge and close. The dolphin rolls over in the shallow water of the lagoon. I’m afraid that he’ll strand himself, but he sculls lazily into deeper water, and floats there. I can see one of his bright eyes watching me.

  It’s very strange that he doesn’t speak, but I don’t want to break my promise to Seiliko by trying to make him talk. I’m confident that he’ll wait for me.

  I wade inshore, waist-deep, thigh-deep, then splash ankle-deep through the shallows on to dry, warm sand. I can’t see the lights of the houses now because a little ridge ahead of me hides them. Leaves hiss, and there’s a rattle and then a crack as if something’s treading on dry twigs. Thoughts of snakes, poisonous spiders and crocodiles crowd my mind. I hold my breath and tiptoe forward. Sand sifts between my toes, and then I’m on a path.

  There’s a light shining ahead of me. I can see a vague dark shape that is probably a house. It looks too low for a house, though, more like a shed. There’s only one storey, and the roof has a dull metal gleam. A wooden verandah runs around the house. I creep forward silently, praying no dog starts to bark. The light is coming from a window on the left-hand side of the building.

  The ground prickles my bare feet. I put them down cautiously and noiselessly. I’m about ten metres from the verandah steps when the door opens suddenly, spilling light. An outlined figure stands there, looking into the dark.

  It’s a woman, wrapped in a dressing gown. You know how you can recognise people without ever seeing their faces, just from their shape and stance? I would know her shape anywhere. My eyes burn and her figure blurs.

  “Mum!” I whisper. She freezes, then turns slowly towards me. I expect her to cry out for Roger, but she doesn’t. Very quietly, as if any noise might scare me away, she says, “Sapphy?”

  “Yes.”

  Mum seems to fly down the verandah steps and across the prickly grass. She stops just short of me. “Is it really you, Sapphy?”

  “Yes.”

  Slowly she stretches out her hands and puts them on either side of my face. She turns my face towards the moonlight and looks at me for a long time.

  “It is you,” she breathes at last.

  “I had to come and see you, Mum. I had to ask you something.”

  “What is it, lovely girl?” Her words pierce my heart. I’d forgotten that Mum used to call me that, long ago when I was little.

  “Mum, do you think that Dad is dead?”

  Mum doesn’t answer straightaway. Her fingers stroke my face, very gently, like the warm breeze. I can’t see her eyes because she’s got her back to the moon.

  “Mum?”

  “Yes,” she says, “he’s dead, Sapphy. Do you think I’d ever have gone with Roger if your dad was alive?”

  “No,” I say, “I know you wouldn’t.” And I do know it, because Mum’s not the kind of person who would just change from Dad to another man, unless she was sure it was right.

  “Can I ask you something else?”

  “You can ask me what you want, Sapphy.”

  My dark, shadowy questions have come to the surface, and now I know what they are.

  “Why are you so afraid of the sea?” Mum’s fingers go still. She takes a quick breath.

  “What I was most afraid of has already happened. The sea has taken your father.”

  “But you were afraid before that.”

  “That’s true. I always told your father it was because of what a fortune teller told me.”

  “Wasn’t that true, then?”

  “Yes, it was true in a way, but there was more to it than that. I can tell you now
, lovely girl, seeing as we’re both asleep and dreaming. When I was a little girl I was crazy for the water. Your grandma always said I could swim like a fish before I was two years old. She could throw me into the sea and I was never afraid. I’d laugh, she said, and dive in and out of the waves. Then one day I must have thought I could breathe underwater like a fish.”

  My body tenses. I can hardly believe what I’m hearing. Mum thought she could breathe underwater! Mum was so at home in the sea that she played in the waves, laughing! It seems incredible. I can’t connect it with the mother that I know.

  “Could you, Mum? Could you breathe when you tried?”

  Mum laughs harshly. “I nearly drowned. I went down and down and the water was so rough that no one could see me. Your grandad had to dive in and feel around until he caught hold of me by my hair and dragged me out. I fought him, he said, and he told me that people who are drowning always fight their rescuers. He said I cried for days afterwards. I kept saying that the sea wanted me. Wanted to drown you, more like, he said, because he wanted to frighten me in case I did it again. That’s when the fear started. I wouldn’t go near the water any more.”

  “Do you remember what it was like, Mum, when you went down under the waves and they couldn’t see you?”

  “No. Only what they told me. I do remember one thing which I think was real, not just remembering what they told me. There was a pain like fire in my chest, and then just as it was getting better, that was when I was pulled out. That’s why I was so afraid for you, Sapphy. As soon as you were born you loved the sea. Before you could even walk you’d stretch out your arms and cry to go in it. Mathew said you used to wriggle to get free when he took you in the water. I always thought the same thing might happen to you as happened to me when I was little, and maybe this time we wouldn’t be in time to pull you out. You were always wild for the water. I was more afraid for you than for Conor.”