Helen Dunmore - The Complete Ingo Chronicles - Ingo, The Tide Knot, The Deep, The Crossing of Ingo, Stormswept

The wind has died down over the weekend. It’s a cold, still night and the air smells of salt and seaweed. The moon is almost full, and it is riding clear of a thick shoal of clouds. I decide to take Sadie away from the streetlights on to the beach, where she can chase moon shadows.

I head down to Polquidden. The bay is full. It’s high tide. An exceptionally high tide. It’s not due to turn until eleven tonight, but look how far it’s come up the beach already. It reminds me of the autumn equinox, when the water came up right over the slipway and the harbour road.

There is still a strip of white sand left, but the water is rising quickly, like a cat putting out one paw and the next. Something else that surprises me is how quickly the sea has calmed. Surely the water should be much rougher than this after all the wind yesterday and today? The stillness is eerie.

Sadie doesn’t want to go down the steps. She puts her head down, with her legs braced apart.

“It’s all right, Sadie, you’re allowed on the beach now, remember?” I give a gentle tug on her lead, but she won’t budge.

“Sadie, you’re being very annoying…”

I am longing to be down on the sand. I pull a little harder, but she digs in her claws. I don’t want to force her.

“All right, then, Sadie. Wait here a minute.”

I loop her leash around a metal post. Sadie whines. There’s enough moonlight for me to see her face. She is pleading with me to stay, but I’m going to harden my heart this time. I’ve got to go down to the beach. The urge is so powerful that I ignore Sadie’s voice, give her a quick hug and say, “Stay, Sadie!” and then hurry down the steps.

There’s a sound of running water on my right. It’s the stream that tumbles down the rocks on to the beach. Children play in it and make dams in summer. The water glints in the moonlight as it pours over the inky-black rock. The sea is still rising. Why does it look so powerful tonight, even though there are no wild waves, no foam, no pounding of surf?

There’s not much beach left. I walk to my right, towards a spine of rocks that juts from the glistening sand. A wave flows forward, and I leap up on to the rocks to keep my trainers dry. But I’m still not quite high enough, because now the water is swirling at my heels. I scramble up again on to dry rock, and look back. The bay is full of moonlight and water. The sea is lapping around my rock already.

Sapphire, you idiot, you’re cut off ! But it’s not very deep yet. Even in the dark I’ll be able to wade back easily before the tide comes in any farther. I’ll just take my trainers off. But I’d better be quick; look how the water’s rising—

“You’ll have to swim,” says a voice behind me. I start so violently that I almost fall off the rock. A strong hand grasps my wrist.

“It’s me, Sapphire.”

“Faro.”

“Yes.”

Suddenly I’m angry with him. “Why don’t you and Elvira come and see us in daylight, like you used to?” I ask sharply. “Conor keeps looking for Elvira. Where is she?”

“Here and there,” he says, with a gleam of laughter in his voice. “Around and about. Just like me.”

“Don’t laugh at me!” I say angrily. “I hate it when people are here one moment and then they just—”

I swallow the words I was going to say.

“I didn’t disappear,” says Faro seriously. “I won’t ever disappear. I promise you. But in St Pirans it’s more difficult for you to see us. Even at night it’s not easy. There are so many people. And besides, St Pirans is not our place.”

“I know that,” I say gloomily. “It’s not mine, either.”

“But you’re human. That’s what humans do, isn’t it? They crowd together in towns and cities. They love it when everything is covered over with concrete and Tarmac.”

Faro brings out the word Tarmac with pride. He loves to impress me with his knowledge of the human world.

“You’ve been talking to the gulls again. Do you even know what Tarmac is, Faro? Or concrete?”

“Of course I do. It’s stuff that humans pour on the earth to stop it breathing.”

The moonlight is strong enough for me to see his face clearly. “Faro, have you grown older?”

I know that their time runs differently from ours. Is it possible that Faro has grown a year, when I’ve only grown a few months? Or maybe he only looks older because of the expression on his face.

“You can enter Ingo in darkness, even from here, Sapphire. You already know that.”

A tremor of fear and anticipation runs through me. “But I can’t come to Ingo now, Faro. Mum’s expecting me back with Sadie. If I’m away more than half an hour at most, she’ll go crazy.”

“You don’t need to worry about that. Time is hardly moving at all tonight.” He says it casually, as if saying that a boat is hardly moving across the water.

“What do you mean?”

“What I say. It’s a fortunate night, Sapphire. Come to Ingo now, and you’ll be back almost before you’ve gone. Look up at the moon.”

I stare up at the moon. The clouds look as if they are flying away from its bright surface. Moonlight bathes my face with silver.

“You’re already in Ingo, Sapphire,” says Faro.

He is right. Deep in my heart, I’ve already left the Air. The powerful, silent swell of the tide is covering my feet, my knees, my waist. The next pulse of water lifts me from the rock, and swallows me into the sea.

Into Ingo. I let out my breath, and it hardly hurts at all. I am breathing without breathing, my body absorbing oxygen from the rich water. My hair flows upward, then swirls down around my face. I push it aside. Ingo. I am in Ingo again, just as I was two nights ago. There’s a path of moonlight striking down deep into the water. I plunge forward and follow it.

How strongly I can swim in Ingo. My strokes are far more powerful than anything I can do in the Air. Below me, moonlight catches the glisten of the white sand on the sea bed. The water doesn’t feel cold. It feels like – it feels like…

Like home. Like the place where I am meant to be. I open my eyes wide and turn my head, and there is Faro swimming alongside me. The underwater moonlight shines on his tail.

“Look!” He points down. There’s a shadowy hulk, half buried in the sea bed. It’s not a reef, or a dead whale, or anything that belongs to Ingo. It’s something that belongs to Air. Metal. Yes, that’s what it is. A metal ship, half rotted away with rust, sailing to nowhere.

“I know what that is,” I say. “It’s the wreck of the Ballantine . You can see her funnels from the beach at low tide.”

“The wind drove her onshore and she was broken up,” says Faro. “We called and called to warn the sailors, but they couldn’t hear us.”

“Faro, the wreck happened seventy years ago. Why do you always talk about history as if you were there?”

“Open your mind, Sapphire. Let’s talk to each other like we did last summer.” He saw my memories, and I saw his. That’s what the Mer can do, because Mer minds are not quite separate from one another, as human minds are.

“Do you want to see what happened?” asks Faro. He floats close to me. “Look at the Ballantine , Sapphire.”

I gaze into the shadowy depths. We could swim down with a few strong strokes, and touch the jagged metal sides of the drowned ship.

I don’t want to. The wreck scares me. It must be terrifying to be driven ashore, helpless, caught by storm and tide. To know that your ship is going to smash on the rocks and break up, and that the water is too deep and wild to swim for shore.

The wind is beginning to whistle. I hear voices, crying out in terror. The Ballantine surges forward on a huge wave, and crashes on to the hidden reef. The entire ship judders with the shock. Metal shrieks and rips and grinds as the side of the Ballantine is torn open and the sea pours into her belly. Then the jumble of sound is pierced by human screams.