it.
They swam south for many days at leisure while the spear-wound healed and fur and feathers, singed in the sulphurous vapours, grew again. The days were longer, and the sun had barely dipped below the horizon before re-emerging to resume its orbit of the sky. Once, they came across a great shoal of silvertail, and fed until they were almost too full to float, but they saw no creatures they could talk to save a few smallfish who spoke a dialect they did not recognise. Another time they found a vast mat of kelp, rootless, drifting on the current with all its mobile populace. Ezroc thought it might be one of the Floating Islands in the stories, but Keerye said no, islands were solid, and did not wallow in the water.
‘I think there are no islands any more,’ Ezroc said.
But they kept on searching.
And then they saw it, on a day without sunset, a great hump looming out of the water ahead of them. It looked like a boulder or cluster of boulders, sea-smoothed, rose-tinted and marbled in blue, with occasional fan-like growths sprouting from cracks and testing the air with feathery tendrils. Keerye swam eagerly towards it, ran his hands over the boulders, then pulled himself out of the water and sat in the sun, shedding even the semblance of a tail, naked in his skin and gilded with light. Only his long silver hair and velvet-dark eyes showed him for a selkie.
‘This is what we sought,’ he said. ‘A Floating Island. Where there’s one, there will be more. Maybe there’s real land still, in the utter south, land with roots that go all the way to the world’s heart. The stories must be true after all.’
‘Are you sure it’s an island?’ Ezroc said, circling the atoll, still too wary to land there. ‘Denaero warned us—’
‘Denaero was a child, afraid of ghosts. This is solid: look!’ He slapped the boulder, making a wet sharp thwack!, but to Ezroc’s ear, it didn’t sound quite right.
‘It doesn’t feel like rock,’ he said, alighting beside Keerye. ‘Rock should be hard.’
‘It’s hard enough. I’m going to sleep here for a while. It’s too long since I slept out of water.’
‘I’m not tired,’ Ezroc lied. ‘I’ll keep watch.’
He took off again and drifted on the high air, scanning the sea in all directions, but could see no other island nor any living thing. The translucent water seemed to be empty even of smallfish, clear and limpid as a lagoon. That troubled him, though he couldn’t define why, and he widened the radius of his flight, covering a large area round the atoll, but still there was nothing to be seen. At last he settled on the water close to the island, folded his wings, and slept.
When he awoke he was alone. The sun was low, though it would not set; sky and sea met on the horizon in an arc of reflected fires. And in every direction there was only water. The island – and Keerye – had gone.
Ezroc hurled himself into the air with a great cry which seemed to carry to the ends of the world. He told himself it was a Floating Island: it had simply floated away. He would find it soon, and Keerye still sleeping, stretched out on the blue-veined boulders. He had only to fly high enough and he would see it: how could you lose an island?
‘Those are not islands,’ Denaero had said. ‘Don’t go near them …’
The dread lay coldly on his heart, dread and worse than dread, the terrible foreknowledge that it was too late, it had been too late from the moment he fell asleep. The island was gone and Keerye was gone and he would never see his friend again. The wide wastes of the ocean ached with his desolation, a void that could not be filled. He flew higher and higher, and the sun fell away beneath his wings, and the huge solitude of the sea unrolled below him, without land or life, empty now forever more. He would fly all the long lonely miles back to the north, and tell his tale to those who would mourn, or curse his name – Ezroc the faithless, who lost his childhood playmate and dearest friend – and then return to the south, travelling the seas for countless moons, until he knew every wave, every tug of the world’s current, every whim of the winds. His journeys would become a legend to outdo his ultimate grandsire, his adventures a fairytale for children; but he would never find Keerye again. His keening wail echoed over sky and sea, harsh with longing and despair.
‘Keeeeryeee … KEEEEEERYEEEE
No answer came.
He was the bird, and the bird was him. He felt the air under his wings, bearing him upward, the sun warming his feathers, the huge angry pain of his heart. It was too much pain, too much to endure, and he pulled his mind away, letting the bird go, watching its flight track into the sun while his thought sank seawards and drifted into a dim blue realm, no longer sharp with the awareness of the bird but soft and dream-like. In the azure gloom he saw the island, not floating on the surface but moving through deep water, the rose-stained boulders swelling and shrinking like the bulb of a vast jellyfish. A skein of tentacles trailed behind it, fifty yards long or more. Something pale was tangled in their grasp, something that barely struggled now. Vision dipped under the bulb and he saw a dozen mouths opening and closing, each with a ring of needle-tipped teeth. The pale thing, still wriggling slightly, was manoeuvred towards them, passed from one to another as each took a bite. Blood smoked on the water, but not much: the feeder did not believe in waste. Above, the bulb turned from pink to crimson as it gorged, pulsing with a glow of its own; the blue veins empurpled and swelled into ridges. Briefly, he touched its mind, such as it was – the mind of a glutton enjoying a rare special feast.
He wrenched his thought away in horror, out of the sea, out of the dream, through the veils of sleep to his own world.
‘Define the Irish Question between 1800 and 1917,’ Nathan read aloud.
‘If we knew the question,’ his mother said, ‘we might be able to work out the answer.’
‘I don’t think that’ll satisfy Mr Selkirk,’ Nathan sighed. He pushed his history essay aside and replaced it with a plate of buttered toast with honey and cinnamon, a recipe of his uncle’s. The honey had oozed just the right distance through the toast and he bit into it with enthusiasm, if a little absent-mindedly.
His mother noted his abstraction and knew or guessed the reason, but was prudent enough to say nothing. He was fifteen now, too old to press for confidences. She only hoped, if there was trouble, he would tell her in the end. The summer had been long and uneventful, a summer of normal teenage preoccupations: success (and failure) at cricket, doing homework, not doing homework, friends, fads, hormonal angst. They had managed a trip to Italy, looking at palaces and pictures in Florence and then staying with Nathan’s classmate Ned Gable and his family in a villa in Umbria. Annie had feared they would never afford their share of the rental but somehow Uncle Barty had found the money, though he wouldn’t accompany them. These days, he rarely left the old manor at Thornyhill, deep in the woods.
Yet he wasn’t really a stay-at-home sort of person. He had told Annie once that he was born in Byzantium before the fall of the Roman Empire, which, she worked out, made him about fifteen hundred years old. He called himself Bartlemy Goodman, though it was probably not his name. She might have thought him mad or unusually eccentric if she hadn’t known him so well and seen what he could do, when the occasion demanded it. He had taken her in on a cold lonely night long ago when she was pursued by invisible enemies, becoming an uncle to both her and Nathan; and as her son grew up into strange adventures, Bartlemy had been their councillor and support. But there had been no adventure
