“Yes.” His voice sounds strange. He’s leaning right across to the chimney. His hand is almost in the dark mass of the nest. He’s taking something out of it. Now he’s looking at what’s in his hand.
Conor freezes. Sadie and I stare upwards in suspense. Slowly Conor’s hand closes around whatever he’s found. He teeters as if he’s forgotten he’s at the top of a ladder. For a second I think he’s going to lose his balance. At my side, Sadie lets out a volley of warning barks. I turn around and see dark specks on the horizon, growing bigger as I watch. The gulls.
“Conor! Get down quick! The gulls are coming.”
Conor scrambles down the ladder one handed. As he jumps to the ground, Sadie leaps around him, barking protectively. The sky is suddenly full of gulls. A cloud of beating wings hides the chimney as they circle the nest, screeching out their anger.
Conor’s holding a handful of seaweed. “Is that what the nest is made of?” I ask.
He nods. “It’s all woven together.”
“But gulls don’t make nests like that.”
Conor shrugs. He is very pale. He pushes apart the strands of weed and I see a pale, glistening oval, about the size of a fingernail.
“That’s not a gull’s egg.”
“Look at it, Saph.”
I look at the egg. It is translucent green. Inside it there is a tiny creature, moving. A creature with fins and a tail. A fish. I shudder.
“The nest was crammed with them,” says Conor.
“But if they hatched, they wouldn’t be able to breathe in the air.”
“I don’t know what they are,” says Conor. “Touch the shell, Saph.”
I put out a finger reluctantly, and prod the egg. It is rubbery. There’s liquid inside in which the little fish can swim. I snatch my hand away. There is a ringing sound in my ears. My mouth turns dry.
“Why have they put the eggs on our house?” I whisper to Conor.
“They’re just trying to scare us.”
“Do you think he’s behind it? Ervys?”
“Probably.”
“What are we going to do with this horrible egg thing?”
“Feed it to Mary Thomas’s cat.”
I laugh, but my spine crawls with horror as I imagine fish hatching out of the eggs and swarming all over our roof. I know what Ervys is telling us. You human creatures are coming into my world. I have my powers too. I can make Ingo come to you. It’s happened before. Fish swam in the streets of St Pirans after the Tide Knot broke and the sea flooded the town. Ervys thought that was a great victory for the Mer, in the battle between Ingo and the human world.
The gulls have settled on the roof again, in a long line, watching and waiting.
“What are we really going to do with the egg?” I whisper.
“I don’t know. Bury it?”
“No. That’s what they expect us to do. Let’s give them a surprise, Conor. Let’s take the egg down to the sea and release it.”
Conor looks at me, eyebrows raised. “You’re very peace loving all at once, Saph.” But he gives me the egg in its nest of weed. I am just putting it in the watering can so it won’t dry out before I can take it down to the cove when there’s an explosion of wings and silent, furious, stabbing beaks.
“Sadie!”
We both rush to her, screaming at the gulls. They fly off, climbing steeply into the sky like planes after they’ve dropped their bombs. Sadie stands silent, quivering all over. On the golden fur of her back there is a long, ugly wound. Her blood wells and spills down her coat.
“Sadie!”
She is too shocked even to bark. I rub her face, calling her name.
“Bastards,” says Conor. “Quick, Saph, help me get her into the cottage. I’ll call Jack’s and ask them to help us get her to the vet. She needs stitches.”
It’s early evening. Sadie is asleep on the hearth rug. I’ve lit a fire, and the reflection of flames dances on her coat. The vet has stitched her wound and dressed it, and given Sadie an injection against infection. Conor spent his savings to pay the vet’s bill.
Mary Thomas said we’d have to get someone up from the council to do something about those gulls. We just nodded.
Rainbow and Patrick will be here in half an hour. Rainbow is bringing some pasties from St Pirans, because we told her what had happened to Sadie and that we hadn’t had a chance to cook.
Conor reaches forward to put another log on the fire. “So are you still going to release that fish back into the sea?” he asks. His voice is harsh.
“Yes,” I say.
“You’re crazy, Saph. Mary Thomas’s cat should have it.”
“No,” I struggle to explain. “If we act like them – like Ervys – it will never end. There’ll be one revenge, and then another, and then another…”
“I get the point. There’s another solution, though, Saph. We could walk away.”
“What do you mean?”
“We get out of it. Turn our backs on Ingo completely. If you don’t feed your Mer blood by thinking of Ingo and going to Ingo, it’ll grow weaker. In a few years’ time you might not even remember that it’s there. You’ll look back and believe that Ingo was one of those things you used to be interested in before you grew up.”
“How can you say that, Conor? Ingo is real.”
“Of course it’s real. But it doesn’t have to be real for us. Look at Sadie. That happened because of us going to Ingo. Do you really want to live like this, Saph?”
“Conor, I can’t believe you—”
And at that moment it comes. A low, thrumming sound that is sweet and piercing at the same time. It seems to begin deep in the shell of my ear, as if it’s growing from inside me. But it’s not just inside me, it’s outside me too. It beats the air like a bell, but it’s not an Air sound at all. It’s salty, full of tides and currents and vast undersea distances. It sounds like the sea beating on the shores of my understanding. It’s a summons, an invitation, a command.
Conor hears it too. The log rests in his hand, forgotten. The sound grows until there is nothing else in the room, nothing else in the whole world. Every cell in our body vibrates to it, and now, suddenly, I grasp its meaning. I am hearing the Call. I am being invited to come to the Assembly chamber as a candidate for the Crossing of Ingo. It’s what Faro told me about, but I never thought it would feel like this. I glance down at the bracelet of woven hair that is always on my wrist. My hair, twined so close into Faro’s that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. My deublek bracelet. Faro’s voice comes back to me. And then, little sister, we will present ourselves to the Assembly, and say that we are ready to make the Crossing of Ingo.
The Call thunders through us. Faro will hear it too in Ingo. And Elvira. The log falls to the floor as Conor reaches out and grabs my hand. I’ve never seen Conor look like this. Lit up, like a face with a torch shining on it, except that the light is coming from inside him.
“Saph,” he says, “you hear it too, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“I was wrong. Everything I said was wrong, Saph. We’ve got to answer the Call.”