The Castle in the Sea: Quest of the Sunfish 2 Page 9

  Essie did not find this thought very comforting, but she did her best to rally their spirits. ‘When we reach land,’ she said, ‘what’s the first thing you’re going to eat?’

  ‘A hamburger,’ Will said instantly, ‘with two burgers and lots of cheese and tons of ketchup and mayo.’

  ‘I want a huge bowl of fried noodles,’ Essie said, ‘with spicy chicken and three kinds of sauce and all the trimmings.’

  ‘And chocolate cake,’ Will said.

  ‘And ice-cream with fudge sauce and honeycomb bits and marshmallows on top.’

  They found they could talk about food for hours, refining their perfect post-rescue menu, discussing the pros and cons of almost every kind of junk food and sweet treat. It couldn’t make them any hungrier than they already were, and it gave them something to think about that wasn’t the grim reality of their situation.

  But then finally the day came when there was no food left at all. The ocean shimmered around them, flat, empty. ‘There’ll be fish eventually,’ Will said. ‘I know I can get something.’

  But by now they both knew that was not looking likely.

  That night they slept as they always did—lightly and uncomfortably—and in the dying hours of the night something woke them: a strange sound, a nickering, clicking, whistling sound.

  ‘What is that?’ Essie hissed, drawing herself as far from the edge of the raft as she could. There was no moon, but starlight glowed.

  ‘Dolphins,’ Will said.

  He sat up to see a pod of dolphins moving around the raft. They seemed to be surging insistently around the port side, then turning to look at him directly—were they trying to catch his eye?—before leaping and curving and swimming about again.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Essie asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Will said.

  The longer he looked, the more he realised they were staying in front of the raft’s leading edge. He’d taken the sail down for the night, but there was still a current carrying them forward, and the dolphins were swirling about directly in the path of the raft.

  ‘I wish they wouldn’t swim right in front of us like that,’ Essie said. ‘They’re so beautiful. I’d hate to hit one of them.’

  ‘We won’t hit them, they’re too smart for that,’ Will said. ‘They like to surf bow waves.’ He’d seen dolphins surfing the Sunfish’s bow wave, all exuberance and pleasure in the water. But this was something different.

  He pulled himself to his feet and looked ahead. The ocean was a black mirror in every direction with only the faintest shimmer of starlight on its surface—except for directly ahead, where he could see white foam.

  ‘There are rocks ahead!’ he cried.

  They sprang into action to fend the raft off whatever lay ahead. Will raised the sail and Essie took the rudder, taking their cues from the dolphins, who seemed to think they ought to turn to starboard. Breeze filled the sail. Will grabbed the oar and paddled as hard as he could. Ever so slowly, the raft changed course. The white foam ahead of them drew closer and closer. The raft drifted on in its slow, ponderous fashion, turning past the white water and the rocks that lay beneath it just in time, and floating safely into open water once more.

  The dolphins swam with them until the danger had passed, and then went arching away without so much as a farewell squeak or backward glance. Essie and Will watched them go, stunned by what had just happened.

  ‘Did they just rescue us?’ Essie asked.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Will said. ‘You hear stories about stuff like that happening, but I never really believed it.’

  The first light of dawn was creeping into the sky now. They could see what they’d nearly hit: a rocky islet, entirely bare of soil or vegetation or shelter of any kind. Just rocks in the ocean.

  But where there were rocks there were sometimes fish, so Will spent the morning on his belly, leaning out over the water, hoping he might catch something, but came up empty-handed.

  Giving up at last, he slumped down beside Essie.

  ‘I’m so tired,’ he said.

  ‘That rowing looked like hard work,’ Essie agreed.

  He was silent for a moment, his eyes closed. ‘I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up,’ he admitted.

  ‘Hey,’ Essie said. ‘We’re going to be okay. You didn’t catch anything today, but I know you will soon. Here, have some water. It’ll help.’

  Will had some water. It didn’t really help. His reserves of strength were ebbing away; paddling the raft away from the rocks had used up almost everything he had. He knew he didn’t have many more efforts like that left in him.

  Late in the day, he was woken from a doze by a splash. He looked up; a sleek dark grey head was looking at him from the water. It let out a little stream of clicks and chirps and he was about to say, ‘Hey, the dolphins are back!’ when a voice came, seemingly out of nowhere.

  ‘Are you lost?’

  Pilot program

  Will stared at the dolphin. The dolphin stared back. Then it whistled again and the voice spoke. ‘Are you lost?’

  The dolphin’s mouth wasn’t moving, but he noticed the dolphin was wearing a harness around its neck. He realised the dolphin must be speaking through some kind of translator unit attached to the harness. They’d encountered this kind of thing once before, on the island of the great red apes; before the Flood, scientists had given the apes translator units that allowed them to turn their thoughts into human speech. They’d used it to create epic poetry.

  ‘Yes, we are,’ Essie said eagerly. ‘Can you help us?’

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ asked the dolphin.

  ‘Dasto Puri,’ Will said.

  As soon as he said it he knew it was a ridiculous suggestion. How would a dolphin even know the human name of an island, let alone where to find it? The dolphin disappeared below the water, and for a moment Will thought it had merely swum away. But then he heard clicks and trills and realised that there were more of the pod here, and that they were, perhaps, conferring with each other.

  The dolphin appeared again. ‘You’re going the wrong way,’ it said. ‘Come.’

  Will did his best to steer the raft and go where the pod wanted them to go. From time to time, some of the pod would break off and go away to do something else, returning hours later, but at least one dolphin would always remain with the raft, showing them which way to go.

  Late on the first day they saw something that surprised them. Two dolphins surfaced near them; one was wearing a translator, but as they watched it slipped out of the harness and the other slipped smoothly into it.

  The second dolphin then swam up to them. ‘This is not a very good boat,’ it said.

  ‘It’s a raft,’ Will said. ‘It was the best we could do.’

  ‘We were marooned on an island,’ Essie added.

  ‘Which island?’

  ‘We don’t know its name.’ Will described it—its shape, the junk-catching spur, the currents—and the dolphin whistled.

  ‘I know that island. Why did you leave? You could die out here.’

  ‘I’m trying to find my sister.’

  ‘Sister? Family. Families are important.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ Will said. ‘Who helped you to talk?’

  ‘We could always talk,’ the dolphin said. ‘You just couldn’t understand us.’

  ‘True,’ Will said. ‘But someone gave you that device. Who was it?’

  The dolphin let out a long string of sounds and some of the other dolphins joined in before more words emerged in Duxish. ‘You call them the Admiralty.’

  ‘Really?’ Will said, surprised. ‘I didn’t know they did this kind of stuff.’ Teaching animals to talk seemed like strictly pre-Flood craziness. Graham was a product of the same technological fad—he had a language chip in his head, although he spoke with his own voice.

  ‘After they broke the ocean they needed our help to understand it,’ the dolphin explained.

  ‘Un
derstand it how?’ Essie asked.

  ‘They wanted us to help them make maps. Navigate. Work out where everything is now that the ocean is different. They captured us and trained us and gave us these word machines. We were part of a pilot program. They wanted us to be pilots. But we didn’t want to be pilots. So we left.’

  Will looked at the dolphin in delight. ‘You mean you ran away from the Admiralty and took their tech with you? That’s awesome.’

  The dolphin had a particularly roguish look on its always-smiling face. ‘It’s not so hard to escape. It’s a big ocean. Especially since you broke it. It’s bigger than it was before.’

  ‘You know we didn’t do that personally, right?’ Will said nervously.

  ‘What’s done is done,’ the dolphin said philosophically.

  ‘Well, thank you very much for helping us,’ Essie said formally. ‘We really appreciate it.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ the dolphin said. ‘We weren’t busy.’

  The dolphin looked like it was about to swim away. ‘There is just one more thing,’ Will said quickly. ‘Our fishing gear got washed away by a storm, and we’re not as good at catching fish as you are.’

  ‘Would you like some fish?’

  ‘If that’s possible,’ Will said politely.

  The dolphin let out a string of noises, but no more words, and disappeared below the surface. The other dolphins answered, and in a swirl of dorsal fins, the pod went surging away. Will and Essie watched them go anxiously.

  ‘Do you think I offended them?’ Will asked.

  ‘I hope not,’ Essie said.

  An hour passed, with no sign of the dolphins. Then Essie spotted a curved fin on the horizon. They stood up to get a better look and saw that the pod was returning. The surface of the water seethed, and it took Will a moment before he realised what he was looking at.

  ‘They’re herding fish,’ he said.

  ‘They’re what?’

  ‘They’ve found a school of fish and they’re driving them towards us.’

  Will was right. The pod cruised through the water, surrounding the school of fish, steering them, frightening them, driving them up to the surface so the smaller fish flapped and leapt in panic. The school came closer and closer to the raft. A few fish leapt out of the water and right onto the raft and Will and Essie scrambled to grab them as they slithered by. But the dolphins weren’t finished. They started slapping the water with their tails, stunning the fish and flicking them nonchalantly onto the boat.

  ‘This is amazing!’ Essie said, gathering fish as fast as she could.

  Some of the dolphins were tossing individual fish to them with their snouts and bouncing them off their backs, like sportsmen doing their best trick shots.

  ‘They’re just showing off now,’ Will said. And they were showing off. But that was one of the things he liked about dolphins: they were cool and they knew it, and they didn’t care.

  Will and Essie kept collecting the feast of fish, not knowing how long they would need to make it last. The dolphins’ presence was miraculous, but it also felt like a whim; Will knew at any moment they might lose interest and swim away again.

  Sure enough, as soon as the dolphins had finished swatting fish onto the raft, one of them lobbed up beside them and said, ‘Are you sure you want to go to Dasto Puri?’

  ‘Yes,’ Will said. ‘Why?’

  ‘The people there are not very nice.’

  ‘We don’t have much choice,’ Will said, ‘that’s where my sister was headed.’

  ‘We don’t go to that place any more,’ the dolphin said. ‘They tried to catch us and steal our word machine. We don’t like to be captured.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Will said. ‘You’ve done enough for us already. We can get there under our own steam.’

  The dolphin let out a string of clicks and squeals, annoyed that Will was being so slow on the uptake. ‘If you go there, they’ll catch you too.’

  ‘Why?’ Will asked, alarmed. ‘Who lives there? Slavers? Pirates?’

  ‘Humans,’ the dolphin said witheringly. ‘But I suppose you call them pirates. You should go to the volcano island. Dasto Dari. Much nicer people there. Hardly ever erupts.’

  ‘But—’ Will said.

  ‘That is all. We’re going now. Goodbye!’

  The dolphin pod pirouetted around the boat, chattering and squeaking, and then all of them dived under the water and vanished, definitively, leaving Will and Essie alone once more.

  ‘Pirates?’ Essie said.

  The help kite

  They drifted for the rest of the day, and all the next, without seeing very much. Then, just as the afternoon sun was sinking below the surface of the sea, Essie saw something.

  There was a shape, a small shape, on the horizon.

  She got to her feet, staring.

  ‘What is it?’ Will asked.

  ‘Is that a sail?’

  It was.

  ‘Hey!’ Essie screamed, waving her arms above her head and jumping up and down, making the raft rock.

  ‘Forget that,’ Will said. ‘Paddle!’

  Will and Essie both grabbed an oar and began paddling frantically. But the sailing vessel was faster, and it was moving away from them.

  ‘Please don’t let us miss them,’ Will muttered as he paddled.

  ‘The kite!’ Essie cried. ‘Let’s try the kite!’

  Fortunately the kite had survived the storm. On her second attempt, Essie managed to get it into the air; it sailed up, tugging against the wind, its colours bright. Essie gazed up at it, hoping with all her heart that the people on board that sailing boat might, just possibly, be looking their way.

  ‘Is anything happening?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re still moving away from us,’ Will said.

  ‘They have to see it!’ Essie said. ‘They just have to!’

  Still the boat sailed on. The sun was already dipping below the water’s surface. It wouldn’t be long before the daylight was gone and their best chance of rescue would be lost.

  ‘I can’t keep up!’ Will said, desperate, still paddling.

  Essie kept the flag flying. Tears were streaming down her face now at the thought that they had come so close to rescue, only to be left behind again. ‘Please look,’ she whispered, tugging on the kite string. ‘Please!’

  ‘Look!’ Will cried. ‘Are they changing course?’

  The boat was turning. Slowly but surely, it began to sail towards them.

  Will was still paddling, but then a thought struck him, a thought so surprising he stopped still.

  The boat looked strangely familiar.

  On it came as the blue dusk descended, like something emerging from a dream.

  ‘Will,’ Essie said slowly, ‘is that . . .?’

  Something launched itself from the top of one of the masts and came soaring across the sea towards them, something blue, green and red. A mighty parrot squawk ripped across the water, and then Graham came wheeling down to drop himself on top of their baggage.

  ‘Where you been?’ he said.

  Reunited

  The four kids and the parrot danced about on the deck of the Sunfish, excited and happy and tearful and thrilled, their stories tumbling out of them in an eager jumble.

  ‘We really found you! Both of you! I can’t believe it!’ Annalie said.

  ‘We both washed ashore on the same island—’ Essie said.

  ‘It had this cove that caught sea trash—’ Will said.

  ‘And it caught us!’ Essie said.

  ‘We thought you must still be on the water, so we looked and looked and couldn’t find you—’ Annalie said.

  ‘We built a raft, and I made a slingshot, and there were dolphins—’ said Essie.

  ‘They said there were pirates on Dasto Puri. Were there pirates?’ asked Will.

  ‘Yes, but they helped us,’ Annalie said.

  ‘Well, sort of,’ Pod said.

  ‘They made us steal some tech from an Admiralty base to
pay for repairs,’ Annalie said. ‘The mast, the electrics . . .’

  ‘Does that include the new paint job?’ asked Will. The Sunfish, formerly a sunny yellow, was now painted white.

  ‘It was Pod’s idea,’ Annalie said.

  ‘I liked the yellow,’ Essie said. ‘I thought it was pretty. And you never had any trouble spotting which boat was ours.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Pod said.

  ‘We got fake registration papers too,’ Annalie said.

  ‘They were expensive,’ said Pod.

  ‘We’ll need them once we go north.’

  ‘North?’ questioned Will.

  ‘We found Dan Gari,’ Annalie said. ‘We were right: Spinner is going to see all the people on the list. He went to Dan Gari first, and now he’s gone north to see Sujana.’

  Will was elated. ‘I knew it! Did you talk to Spinner?’

  ‘No,’ Annalie said. ‘The Kangs wouldn’t let me call or send a message. But at least we know where to go next.’

  ‘So when did he leave?’ Will asked, already on to business. ‘How much of a headstart has he got?’

  ‘A pretty big one,’ Annalie said. ‘But if we’re lucky we can catch up with him.’

  Will nodded. ‘Right then. We’re going to need some cold-weather gear.’

  ‘And more supplies,’ said Pod.

  ‘Ooh, can we go ashore? Somewhere where there’s real food?’ Essie begged. ‘I’m so tired of raw fish I could scream.’

  ‘I’m sure we can find some real food,’ Annalie said. She gave Essie another hug, and then hugged her brother. ‘I’m so happy to see you both!’

  They set a course for a lively port at the northeastern end of the archipelago, where they used another chunk of the money Essie had borrowed from her father’s creditstream to fill the lockers with supplies and buy cold-weather gear. It was always warm in the Moon Islands, so cold-weather clothing was not much in demand and they got some for a good price. Most importantly, they treated themselves to a huge reunion feast, where Will and Essie ate all the food they’d been dreaming of while they were lost at sea.

  Essie got her shell back to find it full of news from home. There was a string of messages from both her father and mother—separately—asking her to come home or send a message or at the very least let them know she was all right. Her father wrote: Every day I wish I could see you again. If you can’t find your own way home, and you want to come back, just let me know, any way you can, and I’ll come and get you.