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- Herausgeber: David Fickling Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Utterly's mother turned and came gliding back between the sunbeams. 'Swim with me, Utterly,' she said. 'I have so much to show you.'Utterly Dark has made a promise - to leave everything she's ever known, and to go and live in the sea with her mystical, oceanic mother. Leaving home is difficult enough, but soon Utterly learns someone is hunting her. Someone - something - from, incredibly, a different time.Utterly will have to delve to the ocean's magical depths, swim through impossible timeslips and face painful choices if she is to save herself, and those she loves . . .A magical new story from the bestselling and prize-winning author of Mortal Engines.
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Praise for Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep
‘Reeve is an exceptional writer and world-builder … A dark and deep adventure encompassing peril and self-discovery that will carry you away on its tide’The Times’ Best Children’s Books of 2021
‘I was captivated by Utterly herself in this immersive coming-of-age narrative’Books for Keeps Books of the Year 2021
‘In this tense and exciting supernatural thriller, readers are immediately immersed in the magic and mystery … a great edge-of-seat adventure for those who like a book to keep them guessing to the end’BookTrust
‘A roller coaster of a story with the survival of orphaned Utterly Dark, one of the most charming and feisty young heroines, at its heart’LoveReading4Kids Book of the Month
‘Reeve’s story has the weft and warp of myth … a slow-burning, darkly involving read’Literary Review
‘A wonderful story, expertly told’Peters’ Book Review
‘Magnificent … magical storytelling’Jenny McLachlan
‘Utterly gripping … Another brilliant adventure from Philip Reeve’Piers Torday
‘An absorbing, brilliant book. A glorious read. I loved my journey to Wildsea’Lisa Thompson
‘Absolutely extraordinary writing, like Charles Dickens writing Ursula K Le Guin … I can’t think of anyone who does worldbuilding the way Philip Reeve does’Ross Montgomery
For my father, Michael Reeve, who took me to Wildsea in the 1970s. (Or at least, to lots of places very like it.)
Contents
1
A Ship from the Depths of the Sea
Utterly Dark lay awake, and the old house on St Chyan’s Head sang to her its symphony of night-time noises. Mice scritched and scratched inside the walls, oak beams and floorboards creaked like old men’s knees, and the windows shifted gently in their frames as the night wind leaned against the glass. Out in the hallway, the grandfather clock tick-tocked, tick-tocked, and softly chimed the quarter-hours. And down in the cove, the small waves whispered on the shingle, reminding Utterly that it would soon be time for her to leave this place and all its dear, familiar sounds behind.
She got out of bed in the long-after-midnight dark. She went to the window and folded back the shutters. The sky was piebald, with patches of bright moonlight showing among drifts of cloud. Out on the horizon, a line of cold light gleamed like the edge of a blade. And black against the glimmer of that light, Utterly could see the outlines of the Hidden Lands.
The house at Sundown Watch had been built there on the clifftop as a lookout, where the Watchers on Wildsea could keep their vigil for those strange islands. The Hidden Lands belonged to the Gorm, that immensely old and powerful being who ruled the sea, or maybe was the sea. They came and went as they pleased out there where sea met sky, visible to mortal eyes only when the Gorm desired it.
Tonight, a tiny point of golden light was shining on the shore of the nearest, largest island.
Utterly waited. She knew something was going to happen, but she did not yet know what it would be. Would the Gorm herself appear, as she had sometimes before, taking the form of a white lady, or a kelp-woven giant, or a gang of shambling Men o’ Weed? But no: there was only the sea, and the moonlight, and that far fire glowing. Utterly’s hot breath fogged the window pane. She wiped the glass with the cuff of her nightdress.
Far to the west, so far that even Utterly’s sharp eyes could barely see it, the sharp reflection of the moonlight shifted, slithering off a long, low wave that rose there suddenly and came sweeping towards Wildsea. It was just a hummock in the sea at first, but as it drew nearer to the land it rose and darkened, gathering weed from the great forests of kelp which swayed below it as it passed. It gathered up other things as well; the shards of shipwrecks: masts and spars and age-blackened hulks. The timbers tossed inside the wave as it rushed on. It stirred them and shuffled them and slammed them together and fitted one broken plank against another until it carried a whole ship on its foaming crest; a ship black as bog-oak, with pennants of weed trailing from her ragged rigging.
The wave roared. Veins of foam marbled its dark face, streamers of spindrift trailed from its crest, and the black ship rode upon it. It was entering shallower waters now, racing up the long, granite roots of the island of Wildsea. It grew taller, taller, until it was as high as the cliffs and the black ship was on a level with Sundown Watch. Its summit curled and crumpled into creamy foam, ready to crash down and drown the cliffs, the coast, and all the little homes that slept behind the dunes.
And there, on the very brink of breaking, the wave stopped. It stood still, a wall of water with the black ship balanced on its brow.
‘Utterly,’ it whispered.
And Utterly knew the time had come for her to leave.
2
The Promise
Utterly had been preparing herself for this moment all winter.
‘When spring comes again, I will go to you,’ she had told the Gorm the last time they had met. And now spring was here again, with blizzards of blackthorn blossom and bleating, bouncing crowds of lambs, and Utterly knew the Gorm would be expecting her to keep her promise. For although she had lived all her thirteen years at Sundown Watch, Utterly was the Gorm’s own daughter.
But, now that the time of her departure had arrived, she realized she must have been secretly hoping all winter that she would not really have to say goodbye to Sundown Watch, and Wildsea, and her friends. Why, Uncle Will, and Aish, and Egg, and Mr and Mrs Skraeveling were far more like family to her than the terrible old Gorm, who had let her wash ashore here in a mermaid’s purse when she was just a baby.
But it was because she cared so deeply for Uncle Will, and Aish, and Egg, and Mr and Mrs Skraeveling, that Utterly knew she had to go. Because the Gorm was a fickle and tempestuous sort of person; quite literally tempestuous at times. Utterly, leaning closer to the window and peering to north and south along Wildsea’s rugged coast, saw the wave waiting there, and knew that if she broke her promise, the Gorm might let the wave break too. The Gorm cared nothing for the land, or for the small lives of those who lived there. The Gorm would think nothing of drowning the farms and cottages of Marazea, and washing away the new vicarage which had only lately been built to replace the one she had destroyed on a previous visit. So Utterly knew she had to leave her friends, for their sake.
She washed her face, then quickly dressed, and packed the little bag she had hidden under her bed. She did not think she would need very many things among the Hidden Lands, because the last time she visited, the Gorm had made her all sorts of fine clothes out of magic. But she packed her comb and hairbrush, because she thought the Gorm might not know about such things and would expect her to brush her hair with a sea-urchin or something, which would be a disagreeable experience both for Utterly and the urchin. And she took the pocketknife that Uncle Will had given her for Christmas, and a length of string her friend Egg had given her because he said you should always have a good piece of string about you. And she took a slice of Mrs Skraeveling’s fruit cake, wrapped in a muslin handkerchief, which she had borrowed from the pantry. (However magical the Gorm was, Utterly doubted she could conjure up a fruit cake half as good as one of Mrs Skraeveling’s.) Then, putting on her cloak and tying her bonnet ribbons very firmly under her chin, she went out of her bedroom for the last time.
Uncle Will was spending the night at Aish’s house on the Dizzard, as he often did now that he trusted Utterly to keep the Watch for him, so she did not need to worry that he would hear her creeping about. Mr and Mrs Skraeveling were snoring softly in their room a little further along the hallway. Utterly wished she could wake them and say goodbye. She wished she could say goodbye to all her loved ones, but she knew she could not, for they would only tell her not to go, and she had to go. So she crept past Mr and Mrs Skraeveling’s door as quietly as a mouse. But when she reached the foot of the stairs she darted half-way up to plant a farewell kiss on the nose of the little wooden tortoise on the landing newel post, the one friend whom she knew would make no fuss. Then she went down again, and the stairs let out the softest creak beneath her small weight.
Egg, asleep beside the kitchen range with Tab the cat curled up on top of him, opened his eyes at the sound. ‘What’s this?’ he wondered, rising up all tousle-headed. Tab slid off him with a complaining little miaow. ‘Hush, puss,’ Egg whispered. ‘There’s shenanigans afoot …’
From the far end of the house came another sound; the snick of the back-door latch as someone quietly closed it. Egg narrowed his eyes. ‘Utterly,’ he said.
Egg had sensed that something was troubling his friend since back before Christmas, maybe ever since they had come home from Summertide. He did not have any very clear recollections of the events that had unfolded there, for they had been events of a magical sort, and magic has a way of fading from human minds like the dew from summer lawns. But Egg was pretty sure Utterly had met the Gorm upon the downs of Summertide, unlikely as that sounded, so far from the sea. And it seemed to him the old Gorm had laid some heavy burden on her, and that this burden had been growing heavier and heavier as the months went by.
Egg would have liked to help her carry it, but whenever he asked what was amiss, Utterly had told him it was nothing. But Egg had kept his ears and eyes open all the same. He had heard her sigh, and seen her run her fingers over the chair backs and stair rails, and gaze sadly at Will Dark and Aish, and even at his own self when she thought he was not looking at her. It was as if she had been privately bidding them all farewell and trying to fix them in her memory.
‘And now she’s sneaking off,’ he told the cat. ‘Sneaking off to go a-swimming with that old Gorm, and not even a goodbye! Well, it won’t do, Utterly Dark! It won’t do at all!’
A late frost lay thickly on the lawn, which sloped down to a hedge and a gate. Beyond the gate, where the land ended and the path led down the cliff to Blanchmane’s Cove, the great wave stood frozen like a painting, and the black ship waited, balanced on its crest. The ship had swung side-on to the house, presenting its rows of rotted gun-ports for Utterly’s inspection. She had no name that Utterly could see, and no crew.
Utterly went down the lawn and through the gate. She gathered up her courage and stepped from the cliff’s edge on to the slimy wooden slope of the ship’s flank. She climbed cautiously up the row of steps let into the timbers. Soon she stood on the deck, between two shapeless lumps of rust and barnacles, which she suspected had once been cannons. The ship was full of small low-tide sounds; drippings and tricklings and the tiny creakings and crackings of wet things drying out. The rigging made thin, inky shapes against the sky, crisscrossing lines and triangles all blotted with clumps of weed, like geometry exercises drawn with a spattery pen. Utterly went carefully up the wet stairs to the quarterdeck, half expecting to find the Gorm herself there, but it was empty.
‘Utterly!’ shouted a voice, but it was only Egg, dashing across the frosty lawn. He hurdled the gate and came to stand at the cliff’s edge, staring up at her. ‘I thought you was up to something, Utterly Dark,’ he panted. ‘The way you’ve been sighing and sorrowing about, like you was off on some journey and thought you might never come home …’
‘I am off on a journey,’ said Utterly. ‘I won’t ever come home. Oh, Egg, the Gorm is calling to me and I have to go!’
‘No you don’t!’ Egg stretched out his hand to her. ‘That aquatic old article can’t follow you on to dry land. She can weave up her Men o’ Weed and her storms and hurricanes if she wants, but we’ll keep you safe from her, Utterly.’
‘You don’t understand, Egg,’ said Utterly. ‘I promised.’
And then, knowing that her mother was not the most patient person, and fearing what might happen if her patience wore thin, she turned away. The wave seemed to know of her decision, and subsided. It did not break, but simply sank back down into the sea, carrying the black ship with it. The ship turned too, the wheel spinning as if at the touch of an invisible helmsman. Then, although the wind was set against it, it began to move swiftly away from Wildsea, out across the Western Deeps towards the Hidden Lands.
‘Utterly!’ shouted Egg, descending the steep cliff path to Blanchmane’s Cove on his bottom, in an avalanche of dislodged stones. The ship was black against the moonlit levels of the sea. ‘Utterly!’ he shouted, clattering down the shingle, pounding across the sand, splashing into the shallows. He could see Utterly standing on the ship’s high stern, but she did not turn at his call. The waves, which had been small till then, suddenly grew huge. They shouted ‘Utterly’ too as they crashed down all around Egg. One knocked him flat, a second came down on him as he surfaced, a third turned him upside down and threw him back upon the beach.
He lay on the sand, soaked through and shivering, listening to the triumphant laughter of the surf. He felt unstrung; almost too weak to pull himself together and stand up. When he finally did, the cove was empty, except for the big waves heaving and plunging in the moonlight. Way out upon the western sea the Hidden Lands showed dark, like silhouettes of islands cut from black cardboard, and the sails of the Gorm’s strange ship glowed faintly as it sailed towards them. The little windows of its stern reflected the moon, and Egg thought he saw a lighter-coloured smudge above them, which he fancied was Utterly’s face, gazing back towards the land and loved ones she had left behind.
3
Good News and Bad
Will Dark, the Watcher on Wildsea, had an unusual marriage. Rather than moving into Sundown Watch with him when they were wed, his wife, Aish, kept up her own house on the north end of the island, for she loved the woods and crags there, and would not leave them for all the world. She would often come to Sundown Watch to stay a week or two, but always she would feel her own hills calling, and go home to them. Then Will would go to stay with her at Dizzard Tor. He had long since accepted that Utterly was quite as capable as him of keeping the Watch, and anyway, Aish had her own lookout place, on the summit of the tor, which offered almost as good a view of the Western Deeps.
There Will and Aish had sat together the previous evening, watching the sun go down over the sea. Once the last light had died and there had been no sign of the Hidden Lands on the horizon, Aish had taken Will’s hand in hers and said, ‘I have good news, Will Dark. At least, I hope that you shall think it good. I did not want to tell you until I was quite sure, and now I am, so you shall hear it.’
And she took his hand and pressed it to her tummy.
Will, waking next morning in her curtained bed, took a moment to remember what it was that had filled his dreams, and now his waking, with such a curious admixture of happiness and worry. Then he remembered. Aish was going to have a baby.
‘Two babies,’ she had said, in the soft twilight up there on the tor. ‘They are twins. I can feel them in there, dreaming their small dreams. I declare, I do not know how it happened. I mean, I do know, of course, but it has never happened before. I am sure I should remember having children.’
When she told him, Will had felt only happiness. Now, with the light of the new day peeking in between the bed curtains, he felt other things. Still happiness, of course, and fatherly pride, but also doubt. What sort of father would he be? His own father had been a stern and distant man, and Will had no desire to be like that, but perhaps fatherhood would make him become stern and distant?
And far worse than his doubts about his own character was the great fear he felt for Aish. So many women died in childbirth, and he could not bear the thought of losing her. He reminded himself that although she looked no older than he did, Aish had lived on Wildsea since the woods were young. She was … Will hardly liked to use the word, it sounded so outlandish, but it was true, wasn’t it? Aish was an immortal goddess. Granted, she was only a goddess in a small way, the local deity of Wildsea and its woods. But surely even small, local goddesses must be immune to the perils that attended mortal childbirth?
So Will did his best to put away his fears, and snuggled against Aish as she slept, and thought what a strange journey he had made. For when he lived in London as a young man he had loathed the very memory of his Wildsea childhood and hated the thought of ever coming back to live here, and yet here he was, so very happy, and so very deep in love, and now soon to have children of his own. How pleasant it would be to have more children at Sundown Watch, bringing happiness and laughter to the old house which he had once thought so gloomy. He hoped they would turn out as well as Utterly and Egg, who were growing into such agreeable, polite, considerate young people –
‘Ahoy, Will Dark!’ shouted Egg at that moment, whisking the bed curtains aside and letting in the dazzling morning sun. ‘Aish! Wake up, you two slug-a-beds! While you’ve been a-snoring here, Utterly’s sailed off in some wormy, haunted-looking great ship. She’s gone! Gone off sea-bathing with the Gorm among them Hidden Lands! And what are we to do?’
They went pell-mell out of the house and up on to the tor’s high summit, Will in his nightshirt, Aish wrapped in a dressing gown. They stood in the blustering wind that had risen with the sun and looked west, and there, just as Egg had said they would, they saw the Hidden Lands. But the ship that had taken Utterly away had long since dwindled from sight, and as they watched they saw the Hidden Lands begin to dwindle too, growing vague and gauzy until you would have said they were only patches of low mist drifting there above the Western Deeps, and then even those were gone.
‘I was afraid of this,’ said Aish. She took Will’s hand, and put her other arm around Egg’s shoulders, pulling him against her side. ‘The old Gorm has called Utterly home.’
‘But this is her home,’ declared Will. ‘What does the Gorm want with Utterly anyway?’
Aish sighed sorrowfully. She had guessed this day would come, and she knew that there was nothing to be done. She loved Utterly like her own daughter, and had often wished that Utterly was her own daughter. She felt certain she would have made a better mother to the girl than that cold old Gorm. Why, the Gorm had let little Utterly wash ashore on Wildsea in a mermaid’s purse when she was a baby, and left it to her father, Will’s late brother, to raise her … But Aish was a fair-minded and forgiving sort of person, so she wiped her tears away and said, ‘The Gorm loves Utterly dearly. She will let no harm befall her out in the sea’s deeps. She has taken her home to the Hidden Lands, to keep her company there, and to learn her Gormish ways.’
‘What ways?’ demanded Egg. ‘You mean like how to drown folks, or turn herself into a great huge seaweed giant? Utterly wouldn’t want to do that.’ He sounded doubtful though. Now that he thought about it, turning into a great huge seaweed giant did sound diverting. ‘But why would she just up and leave us like this?’ he asked. ‘Without even saying goodbye?’
Will sat down on the edge of the tor and put his head in his hands. ‘Utterly is a good, brave girl,’ he said. ‘She feared the Gorm, and she wished to spare us another disaster. She must have decided it would be best for everyone if she were to keep her departure secret. I honour her for it, though I regret it exceedingly. If only she had told us what she was planning! She has been out of sorts lately; I am sure we have all noted it.’
‘Oh, if only I had tried harder to find out what was troubling her,’ said Egg, growing angry at himself.
‘She still would not have told you, Egg,’ said Aish.
‘There is nothing else for it,’ decided Will. ‘As soon as it is light I shall ride over to Merriport and charter a boat to go after her. I fetched Utterly home from the Gorm’s lands once before. I shall do it again.’
‘But the Gorm’s lands have hidden themselves,’ said Aish, ‘and I doubt there is a captain in all the Autumn Isles foolish enough to risk his ship upon such haunted seas. And do you really think the Gorm will let you defy her for a second time, Will Dark? If she sees you coming to take Utterly from her she will drag you down and drown you, and you are needed here. You are needed more now than ever. You have responsibilities. You cannot go gallivanting off across the dreadful deeps with no thought for those you leave behind.’
Will looked up at her, and thought how happy he had been a few short hours ago, and how sad he was now. ‘But I must do something,’ he said.
‘I’ll go if Will Dark won’t,’ vowed Egg.
Aish wrapped her strong arms round the both of them, as if to anchor them to her island. ‘We must wait and see,’ she said. ‘That is all we can do. We know the old Gorm will not harm our Utterly, for she loves her every bit as much as we do, in her own damp, salty, Gormish way. So we can only wait, and see what happens next.’
She and Will went back down to the house to dress and breakfast, but Egg wanted to be alone. He squatted on the tor’s top and watched the sea. Pale wandering pathways of calm water wound through the darker, choppier parts, but they led nowhere, and no Hidden Lands showed themselves out there in the west. The ship that carried Utterly away was growing harder to remember, as if it had been nothing but a dream. Magic was tricksy like that: more vivid than real life when it was happening to you, but harder to keep hold of than a snowflake or a soap bubble. Would Utterly fade from Egg’s recollections too? Would he wake one day and find he had forgotten her face, as he had forgotten the face of the river girl whom he dimly recalled meeting on Summertide?
‘I won’t forget,’ he said firmly, glaring at the empty horizon. ‘We’ll wait and see for a bit, like Aish says. But if that old Gorm don’t let you come home soon, I’m coming after you, Utterly Dark, and that’s a promise.’
4
Swim With Me
The Gorm was waiting for Utterly on the shore of the nearest of the Hidden Lands. She stood on a black rock with the surf breaking around it, and held up a brand of driftwood, which blazed with butter-yellow flames. Her white dress glowed in the gathering daylight, and her black hair swirled above her head as if she were deep underwater.
Once, looking up through sunlit tropical seas, the Gorm had seen a young woman glance down laughing over the side of a boat. The young woman had been so pretty, and the moment so affecting, that the Gorm had tipped up the boat, and drowned her, and copied her face and body for her own. That was the form she used nowadays when she wished to move among human beings and have them worship her. It was the form she had used when she walked on the beaches of Wildsea and first met Andrewe Dark beachcombing there. And it was the form she wore now, to welcome her land-loving daughter back into the deeps.
‘Utterly,’ she said, as the wave drove the old ship hard aground on the sand beside her rock. She tossed her driftwood torch aside and stepped from the rock on to the quarterdeck, smiling down at her daughter while her swirling hair alternately hid and revealed her face, and her eyes turned from grey to blue, then to twinkling silver like a summer sea.
‘Mother,’ said Utterly, making her best curtsey. ‘I have come as I promised.’
Any ordinary mother, indeed, any human being at all, could have told that Utterly’s heart was breaking as she said those words. But the Gorm had little understanding of such things, for she had no heart of her own. She did not even know a name for the feeling that came to her as she took Utterly’s hand and led her towards the ship’s prow. She only knew that Utterly was hers, that she had been too long upon the dry land, and that it was good to have her home at last.
The ship, its voyage done, collapsed back into fragments. The prow, with Utterly and the Gorm upon it, tilted forward until they were able to step easily off on to the shore, and then the waves gathered up the pieces and drew them back into the deep, leaving not one barnacled spar or rusty nail to mar the pale perfection of the sand.
Offshore, on shelves of rock, basked the long-necked dragons who had followed the Gorm here from the seas of long ago: overhead the pale gulls cried their cries. The shadows of the birds’ wings swept across the cliffs, and Utterly followed them with her eyes, up and up, until she saw the house that stood on the clifftop.
It was not the sea-cave palace she remembered from her first visit to the Hidden Lands, but a house of a far more modern and convenient sort, with glazed windows shining in the morning light. There was even a sort of tower or turret at one end. Its proportions were rather peculiar, and its roofs seemed covered with mother-of-pearl rather than ordinary slate, but it had clearly been intended as a copy of Sundown Watch, and as she followed the Gorm up the sandy path to its front door, Utterly felt grateful that her mother would take such trouble to help her feel at home here.
Inside the house the walls and ceilings were all pink. It was like stepping into a colossal seashell, and, like any self-respecting seashell, it echoed softly with the sound of the sea.
A table stood nearby. The Gorm steered Utterly gently towards it. ‘Now,’ said the Gorm. ‘What shall you have for breakfast, daughter?’
‘What do you usually eat, Mama?’ asked Utterly.
‘I?’ asked the Gorm, as if such a question had never occurred to her. ‘Why, I become a whale and drink down whole nations of plankton. Or I become a shark and feast on seals and drowning sailors. Or I become a white worm and sup on the delicious steams that spew from drowned volcanoes in the deepest hollows of the sea.’
‘Perhaps I do not feel hungry, after all,’ said Utterly, who somehow did not fancy any of those delicacies. ‘I had a tolerably large supper at Sundown Watch, only a few hours ago, and I ate a piece of Mrs Skraeveling’s fruit cake on the voyage.’
‘But that was in another world,’ said the Gorm kindly. ‘This is my world, and it is a new day, and new days begin with breakfast, don’t they?’ She was trying so hard to be a mother that Utterly felt quite sorry for her. ‘I shall show you how to be a shark,’ the Gorm decided. ‘No – a great killer whale; nothing but piebald muscle, and hunger, and joy in your own sleek strength. Oh, you cannot imagine how wonderful it feels to be a killer whale.’
‘But I do not wish to be a killer whale,’ Utterly objected. ‘Nor a shark, nor a worm, nor any other creature.’
The Gorm watched her with shifting, sea-coloured eyes, and sighed. ‘How sad,’ she said. ‘How small. You have been too long a-land, Utterly. There is too much of your father in you. You will come to understand. I have so much to show you. But first …’
She clapped her hands, and two Men o’ Weed entered the room. They looked just like the slimy, slopping creatures who had terrified Utterly when they first appeared on Wildsea, but she was more used to them now, and these two seemed very meek and biddable monsters. They carried in trays of silver tableware, a rack of toast, and bowls of fruit. They set it down, then fetched chairs, and placed them at opposite ends of the table, so that Utterly and her mother could face each other as they ate. One picked up a silver teapot and poured liquid from it into a porcelain cup. The liquid was clear like water, but filled with floating green-brown specks, like the torn-up seaweed that sometimes stained the waves in Blanchmane’s Cove.
‘What is it?’ asked Utterly, picking up the cup and sniffing it. It had a brackish smell.
‘What would you like it to be?’ asked the Gorm.
‘I generally take a cup of tea with breakfast,’ said Utterly, and, looking down again into the cup, saw that the liquid had turned brown like milky tea. It smelled like tea, too. She took a sip. It was as good as the tea from Mrs Skraeveling’s pot. She drank the rest, then turned her attention to the buttered toast, the marmalade, the fruits whose names she didn’t even know, whose sweet juices trickled down her chin when she bit into them. And although she was fairly certain that all those things might just be slabs of weed or slimy sea cucumbers if you looked at them in one way, here in the Gorm’s home they were as delicious as her imagination could make them.
When she had eaten, she went with the Gorm out through an arched door into a sort of garden, where the hedges had been clipped into the shapes of dolphins, whales and octopodes. Statues of gods and nymphs stood among the hedges, and between them stretched green lawns speckled with clumps of primroses. Here and there Utterly saw a broken pillar, or a section of tumbled wall, as if many other houses had stood here in the past, and the Gorm had let each of them fall into ruin in its turn.
A path of white gravel led up a low hill behind the house. At the top, Utterly stood beside her mother and looked out towards the west, where countless other islands showed upon the morning sea; far, far more Hidden Lands than any Watcher on Wildsea had ever suspected. She glanced back over her shoulder, past the gardens and the Gorm’s white house, hoping for a glimpse of home. But there was a haze upon the eastern sea, and she could not make out the familiar hills of Wildsea at all.
‘Forget that place, Utterly,’ said the Gorm, guessing at once what she was looking for. ‘You live in my realm now. Here all things can be as you wish them. Come.’
She took Utterly’s hand and began to run down the long western slope of the island, and what was Utterly to do but run beside her? They ran so fast that Utterly’s bonnet blew off and her hair came undone and streamed out behind her like a black flag. The long grass flicked at her feet and her bare legs. Ahead of them the land ended, and she could hear the surf booming against the cliff’s foot, far below.
Utterly tried to slow herself, but the Gorm ran faster, pulling her along. And just as they reached the brink of the cliff and Utterly braced herself for the fearful drop into the sea, she realized that they were already underneath it; the air that rushed around them was cool water, the birds they startled from the grass were fish, and the grass itself was fields of seaweed, giving way to silvery sand as they went further and further from the shore. The sun, shining down through the waves overhead, filled the water with moving pillars of light, and the Gorm let go of Utterly’s hand and went gliding between the pillars in the form of a great golden fish.
Utterly looked down, and found that the sandy sea-floor was falling away below her. She could see the line of her own footprints, stopping short a few yards beyond the place where her mother’s footprints ended. The Gorm-fish turned with a flick of her powerful tail and came gliding back between the sunbeams to join her.
‘Swim with me, Utterly,’ she said. ‘I have so much to show you.’
5
Into the Sea of Time
Utterly swam. Borne on the sea’s strong currents as if upon underwater rivers, she swam with the seals and the death-white whales beneath their glittering ceilings of ice, and among schools of gaudy fish in shallow oceans as warm as bath water. She dived down into the endless night of the great deeps, where the angler fish dangled their cold lamps, and unknowable shapes moved dimly in the everlasting dark. The weight of all the miles of sea above would have crushed any other swimmer as flat as a flower pressed between the pages of a Bible, but it never troubled Utterly. Any other swimmer would have grown quickly tired, and numb with cold, but Utterly could swim tirelessly, and did not mind the deep-sea chill at all. Even the whales had to rise to the surface now and then and fill their mighty lungs with air, but Utterly breathed water so contentedly that it very soon stopped seeming strange to her at all.
Often, when she saw a particularly dear little comical fish or sea horse, or a particularly grand and Romantic underwater vista, she would wish that Egg or Uncle Will were there to share it with her. But now that she could swim so easily, she reasoned it would be a simple matter to swim back to Wildsea and tell them of all the exciting things she had seen. She would go tomorrow, or perhaps the day after. And in the meanwhile, she did not miss her friends too badly, because there were so very many things to divert her.
And always at her side, or close at hand, her mother swam. Sometimes the Gorm took on her human form, but more often she was a dolphin, or a whale, or a gigantic squid, or just a rippling silvery movement in the water. ‘Become a fish,’ she urged Utterly. ‘Become a wave. There are so many better ways to swim than flapping and kicking with those landling limbs. You are of the sea, Utterly. Be one with it. You can turn back to your human shape in an instant if you wish it.’
But Utterly did not wish to become a fish. It seemed to her that her small body, in which she had lived so happily and thoughtlessly for thirteen years, was an essential part of her Utterly-ness, and that if she were to change it on a whim into something with fins or tentacles instead of legs, or dissolve herself into a wave or a deep-sea current, as her mother sometimes did, then she would become someone different. And perhaps that different someone, being no longer so human, would laugh as lightly as the Gorm laughed when they passed a place where ships lay wrecked, and sailors’ bones were whitening among the sea’s wild gardens.
Although she was old and cold and fickle, and almost entirely lacking in patience, the Gorm seemed to understand. When Utterly explained that she did not wish to change her shape, she merely sighed, as if she knew Utterly would come around to the idea one day, and it was simply a matter of waiting. Then, perhaps sensing that Utterly still missed the land, she led her up out of the deeps to those higher portions of the sea where the sunlight shone, and on to shores where people had raised up temples to the Gorm, and lit fires upon the beach by night to honour her.
The Gorm was flattered by such gestures. She basked in mortals’ fear and adoration the way a cat basks in a beam of sunlight. Utterly followed her ashore, and watched the people bow down to her, and offer her plates of fruit, gold necklaces, the roasted flesh of bulls they slaughtered for her on the shore. Sometimes she might accept a necklace or a ring, and laugh at how brightly it glittered. Utterly felt rather proud to have a mother who was so respected. But when they were back in the sea and the Gorm turned once more into a whale or a wave, the gold would fall from her and be forgotten, which Utterly thought a dreadful waste.
Not all the Gorm’s worshippers had gold to offer her, nor bulls and goats to sacrifice. On one of the shores she visited with Utterly, the people had nothing to give the Gorm but people. A boy and girl no older than Utterly had been pegged out on the beach for the rising tide to drown. Their skinny arms and legs were lashed to stakes driven deep into the sand.
The Gorm walked out of the waves with Utterly behind her and stood between the two spread-eagled, trembling bodies. She knelt, and gently brushed away the sandflies, which speckled their frightened faces. Further up the beach, above the tideline, a knot of villagers stood watching. Some looked grim, some sobbed and wailed, but all fell to their knees when the gaze of the Gorm swept over them. Smoke rose from the roof-holes of their huts a little way inland. A wave came rushing up the sand, swirling over Utterly’s feet and foaming around the offerings. The boy sobbed with fear; the girl clenched her teeth to stop herself from crying out.
Utterly felt that she must do something. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘please do not drown them.’
The Gorm just murmured, ‘Hush, child,’ and did not raise her eyes from the two shivering sacrifices on the sand.
Utterly grew angry, and stamped her foot. Since she was standing upon wet sand the stamp was almost silent, but the movement drew the Gorm’s attention.
