“That’s the schoolmaster,” Amariel’s thrum whispered.
“Oh,” Ven thought back. He watched as the hazy water turned clearer.
Suddenly the drift was filled with a moving picture. In the image were millions of small silver fish like the ones watching the lesson. They hovered in the water for a moment, then went from the flat formations in which they normally swam into a series of circles that eventually formed a giant ball in the sea, spinning like a globe. It revolved in the water, the different sections rotating inside the ball, taking turns at being away from the vulnerable outside.
* * *
I can’t really explain how I knew that I was watching a lesson, but it was unmistakable.
With each new movement, each new strategy, there was a thrum that instructed the movement. From the vibration that returned from the immense curtain of fish, it was obvious that the herring were understanding the instruction. The directions were clear and simple. It made me wish my teachers back home had been able to communicate our lessons in thrum.
A few moments later, when the sunlight above the surface shifted, the image in the sunshadow faded.
The huge wall of fish that had been hovering in the water, watching the lesson, began to move into the patterns that the schoolmaster had directed.
All around me, the wall of silver scales shimmered, then formed a sphere that spun in the water just as the lesson had shown.
I could feel the approval of the fish teacher vibrate in my head.
Very good, it seemed to say. Tighten up those corners, now. The top is a little sloppy.
* * *
Amariel was smiling broadly.
“See?” she said as the gigantic ball of herring rolled past. “You’ll never see anything on land do that.”
“No,” Char admitted. “But there are some pretty amazin’ things done by land animals. Have you ever seen a bunch of ants build a hill?”
“I’ve seen a family of crabs make a tower almost a hundred fathoms tall. Don’t try to top the merfolk, Chum, you land-liver. Our animals are bigger and smarter, our mountains are taller, our trenches deeper—you can’t begin to match what’s in the sea.”
“So what happens now?” Ven asked hurriedly, swimming quickly to get between them. Char had started to open his mouth, then choked, forgetting to use thrum in the heat of the argument.
“Well, now that the herring know how to make the Ball, they will head for the coral reef, then out past it, where a storm of plankton is blooming. We can go watch and see if they make it.”
Ven and Char looked at each other blankly.
The merrow sighed.
“All right, let me see if I can put it in land-liver words you can understand. Imagine that the harbor was the city of Kingston, and that here, around the skelligs and the coral reef, is like the inn where you live. Out there, past the reef, is like the Wide Meadows beyond the inn. Does that make sense so far?”
The boys nodded.
“Good. Now imagine that on one day, every flower, vegetable, and seed that acts as food in the Wide Meadows ripened all at the same time. That’s what a plankton storm is like—a giant banquet of food in the sea.”
“Got it,” Ven said. Char looked doubtful but his thrum was silent.
“So, on land, if every bit of food was suddenly available in one place, all the animals that need that food would appear, wouldn’t they? Mice, rabbits, rats. squirrels, bugs, all those nasty little creatures I saw when I was on land with you, would show up in droves, looking to gobble the food up. Right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, those vile little animals are like krill. And everything that eats those creatures, from cats to coyotes and wolves, would come to the feast. It would be one big disgusting picnic. And, of course, wherever there is food, there are birds. Whether it’s seagulls or ravens, there always seem to be birds.”
Amariel pointed up to the surface. Ven looked up. The flocks of seagulls he had seen before entering the sea that morning had grown until they covered the blue of the sky. He thought he could hear their harsh cawing even below the waves as they circled above, diving occasionally for herring that had ventured too close to the surface.
“Sky rats,” Char murmured.
“So if you were a mouse that needed to cross the Wide Meadows in the middle of a feeding frenzy like that, the only way to do it would be to join forces with a lot of your friends and try to make it through all the predators,” the merrow continued. “That’s what the herring do. Obviously a lot of them are not going to make it, and that’s as it should be—I mean, the bigger fish need to eat, too. But many of them do, because there’s safety in numbers.”
“I kinda wish we had brought along the rest of our friends from the inn,” Char said. “Nick and Saeli and Clem and Ida—well, maybe not Ida—”
“They would have had no way to breathe,” Ven interrupted. “I think it’s best that we just tell them the story when we get back.”
“If we get back,” said Char gloomily.
“That’s the spirit,” said the merrow. “Let’s get going—the herring are starting to head for the reef. They must feel that there aren’t many predators, because they’re swimming in sheets. That’s a sign that they have clear seas—so we had better take advantage of that while we can. And if they make it, the herring will throw a party, and we’ll be invited, of course. It will be a huge celebration.”
“Let me guess.” Char’s thrum sounded sour. “A herring ball?”
The merrow blinked. “Well, yes. Herring are great singers, and they dance pretty well, too.”
“Of course they do.” Char looked at Ven, who was scowling at him. “All right, let’s go.”
“If you listen, you can hear the herring singing,” Amariel said as they followed the great silver cloud of fish through the drift and out to sea. “Their thrum is pretty.”
Ven listened. At first he didn’t hear anything, but after a moment he could feel in his skin a pleasant tingling, as if he were being brushed by a feather. Then he realized the thrum was all around him, echoing through the sea.
“That is pretty,” he said.
“It can confuse predators, if there are any nearby,” Amariel said. “Soothing sounds and smooth gestures go unnoticed. A whole school of fish can swim right past a shark if they are singing nicely. It’s jerking movements and thrashing around that comes when a creature panics that will catch its attention.” She gave a thrust of her powerful tail to catch up with the herring.
“We’ll keep that in mind,” Ven thought out loud. He let the drift carry him as Amariel had showed him, and found that he was able to follow the fish fairly easily.
He was paying such close attention to keeping up with the curtain of herring that he didn’t notice the change in the seafloor.
Until something large and dark as night with wings like a giant bat passed directly beneath him.
Waving a sharp weapon that gleamed menacingly in the light of the sun.
10
The Coral Reef
“Uh, Ven,” the merrow said. “Don’t move.”
* * *
She didn’t have to tell me twice.
In fact, I’m not sure she had to do so even once.
* * *
The immense creature glided along the ocean floor, which Ven could see now was alive with strange formations in many shapes, sizes, and colors. Some looked like plants, others like stone, but Amariel had told him enough stories that he was fairly certain he was now hovering above the coral reef the merrow had told him about.
Coral formations made up of billions of tiny animals.
The bat-like beast came to a halt just above the coral bed. It turned to face them, then puffed its back like an angry cat. Its dark hide was mottled with flecks of gray and white, and it looked hollow as it watched them, its gills opening and closing quickly. Ven guessed it was bigger than the bed he slept in back home in the Crossroads Inn.
It’s a marble ray. Amariel’s thru
m echoed in his head. A stinger. You’ve startled him. He doesn’t want to hurt you, but he’s frightened, and he will if you make him feel threatened. And he can kill you very easily. He can break your leg with a swipe of his tail, and that barb is like a land sword—it can run you through.
Ven held still. He hovered next to Char in the drift, who was frozen beside him.
“Sorry to have bothered you,” Amariel said to the ray. “All a mistake. No problem here.”
The enormous fluid creature stared at them, but didn’t move.
Sorry. Ven thought as he hung motionless in the drift. Very sorry.
The ray stared at them a moment longer, then turned and floated away, its rubbery body and whiplike tail with its shiny barb skittering over the glorious colors of the reef below them. Ven heard its thrum in his head, two separate thoughts, as it left. One he could understand easily.
Idiot.
The other was harder to pin down, but as best he could tell it was an observation that each of the sea creatures they had met had made.
Out of place.
* * *
I couldn’t argue with that. We certainly were outsiders in this vast, foreign world. It was clear that the inhabitants of the ocean found us even more odd than we found them.
Even though the ray was gone, I still was unable to move.
But now it was not fear that froze me, but amazement.
Below me the ocean bottom had changed from the sand-strewn floor with patches of seaweed and the broken trash of humans to what looked like a living painting. Here in the depths, away from the beating of the surf, a magnificent wall of color and life was spread out as far as I could see. Coral of all sizes and forms danced in the drift, some shaped like the horns of reindeer, some like great tubes, and others like the wispy fronds of ferns in a watery forest.
And within the plant-like arms of the coral, brightly colored fish darted. A school of beautiful orange and white ones with ruffled fins swarmed below my feet. Their thrum was curious.
* * *
“Those are clown fish,” Amariel whispered in his head. “They’re very friendly.”
Ven smiled. “You have clowns under the sea as well?”
“Well, of course.”
“I’m afraid of clowns,” Char said. He had wrapped his arms around himself and was hovering in the water, trembling slightly.
“You would be,” said the merrow disdainfully. “You have no common sense, Chum. Clown fish are some of the only things in the sea you don’t have to fear.”
“I don’t mean the fish,” Char continued awkwardly. “I mean the ones in the upworld that put on creepy face paint and weird clothes with ruffles and bells and pom-poms. They had a lot of them in the Gated City, in the Outer Market. I don’t like nothin’ with a permanent smile. You can’t tell what it’s really thinkin’.”
“I bet land-liver clowns got the idea for their ruffled clothes from clown fish,” said Amariel. She waved her web-fingered hand, and the clown fish scattered back to the arms of some purple coral that looked like cabbage leaves.
“I guess we are going to have to swim until we get past the reef,” said Ven. “I imagine we shouldn’t walk on the coral.”
“Of course not. Would you want some human walking on your family?”
Ven thought back to his sister, Matilde, and his eleven brothers, his business-like father and his stern mother. Even though Nain were shorter than humans, they were stockier, and generally sturdier. They were also a good deal grumpier, with thorny personalities, and tended to bounce their bellies off anyone who got in their way. Definitely not, he thought to himself. I wouldn’t want to see humans’ feet get bitten off.
Char chuckled, and Ven remembered that his thoughts were no longer his own in the sea.
“Come along,” said Amariel. “Let’s explore the reef.”
The water above them was clearer and bluer than Ven had seen since coming into the sea. The sun shone down steadily through the surface, brightening the colors of the coral and the creatures that lived within it. The sight reminded Ven of the lair of the dragon Scarnag, the beast he had met in a great serpent-shaped cave in the Wide Meadows of Serendair. Scarnag had hoarded books, globes, and maps as well as gems and coins in sparkling towers. Ven wondered if the beautiful reef and its creatures could be the hoard of another dragon, one whose scale he might be carrying at that moment in the buttoned pocket of his vest.
As he was thinking about it, they swam through a patch of bright, hazy light caused by the sun beating down from the sky above. Before he could stop his thoughts, an immense sunshadow image of a dragon appeared.
The beast’s mud-colored hide was striped in colors of green and red, purple and blue and seemed to have been formed from Living Earth itself. His head was roughly shaped, with cruel spines all the way down his back to a tail that had softly rounded spikes on it. His stone-like claws were jagged, and gray smoke curled from his nostrils, almost covering the tiny pair of glasses that were perched on the end of his nose.
Scarnag, whose name meant scourge, was in truth really a fairly pleasant dragon librarian when he wasn’t torching the countryside.
Ven’s head almost exploded as the thrum of every living creature around them gasped and screamed at the same time.
Including all the tiny creatures forming the massive coral reef.
The sheets of herring swarmed around them, then sped off the reef toward deeper water.
Char’s body snapped in shock, then curled up into a ball in pain.
“Gee ma-nee, Ven!” he moaned. “What the heck?”
The merrow spun in a similar fashion. She clutched her head and let out a sound that was half screech, half gurgle.
“By the Blowhole!” she shrieked. “Get out of the sunwater, and think of something else!” She let go of her head long enough to give Ven a violent push with her tail.
Furiously Ven paddled, flailing his arms and kicking his legs hard. He swam as fast as he could into bluer parts of the water until the thrum from the reef subsided. He looked back over his shoulder.
The image of Scarnag had vanished.
The merrow was glaring daggers at him.
The reef was bare of fish.
And Char was still curled up in a ball, sinking slowly toward the bottom of the sea.
“You know, I can’t take you anywhere.” The merrow’s thrum vibrated against his eardrums. “You are so embarrassing. Don’t even say it,” she added as Ven started to apologize. “Get your thoughts under control, Ven, or I’m going to abandon you here in the middle of the coral reef. You are getting to be a danger to associate with.”
Ven swam quickly down to where Char was floating helplessly, and grabbed his arm.
“I’m so sorry,” he thought, trying to keep his brain from conjuring up any more ferocious images. “Are you all right?”
“Awwwggh” was the answer from Char’s thrum.
“I don’t know what to say,” Ven thought to Amariel. “I didn’t mean to think of Scarnag—I don’t know what to do, how to apologize to an entire coral reef—”
“Stop.” The merrow’s thrum sounded a little less annoyed. “Just keep a quiet mind for a moment.”
Ven’s face was red and hot, and it was all he could do to keep from throwing up. I should never have come, he thought, trying to keep his mind from wandering. We’re very far from land, and one more false move might doom us out here. He looked down into the palm of his hand at the magical image of the Time Scissors, the sign of his ability to redo one moment of his Past. Maybe I should undo this whole journey, and take my chances with the Thief Queen on land.
The thought of Felonia made him shiver. He looked around quickly to make sure he wasn’t floating in a patch of sunwater, then tried to make his mind go blank. But his curiosity was burning so intensely that he could not stop the images that were flooding his brain.
Then, his head suddenly cleared.
Around him was a thrum that was both magically distant an
d familiar, a haunting song of a sort that wrapped him in a gentle vibration. He knew he had heard it before, but he could not place it.
He turned to Char, who obviously could feel it as well. His best friend was staring ahead of him.
He pointed. Ven followed his finger.
He was pointing to the merrow.
* * *
Amariel was singing.
Instantly I knew why the thrum was so familiar. Her voice was different underwater than it had been in the air of the upworld, when she sang me songs and told me stories to keep me awake so that I would not slip off the broken piece of driftwood on which she had tossed me to save me when the Angelia blew up. But it had the same tone, sweet and enchanting and calming.
As she sang, the fish and other creatures of the reef that I had frightened away began to emerge from holes in the coral and return. They were gathering around, listening to her, too.
The song did not sound like anything I had ever heard. It had no words or choruses, just a sweet, pleasant melody that made the air from the breathing stone feel cleaner. My head felt light and woozy, and at that moment I would have done anything she asked of me.
I remembered the stories human sailors tell on dark nights about merrows, or mermaids, as they call them, and their songs. They say that they are so magical, so enchanting, that many men who sail the sea meet their doom following those haunting songs to rocks and reefs where their ships are lost, run aground. Hearing her call the frightened fish back to the reef, I could believe it. Then I realized what she was doing with her song.
She was apologizing for me, trying to keep the creatures of the reef from attacking me, or seeing me as an enemy.
I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.
* * *
In a section of the coral of reef below him, many tiny plants suddenly swelled and bloomed between the rocky structures. They opened like flowers blossoming in the sunshine, splashing the coral with their colors of soft orange and vibrant pink and a purple so intense that Ven could actually hear it as it grew. They moved in time to the merrow’s song, almost as if she were calling them with her melody, and they were answering her.