Gods and Warriors by Michelle Paver Read Free Book Online Page A

Issi?
    Fireflies flashed past, trailing threads of burning gold. On a reed he spotted a frog that had eaten so many of them that its belly glowed green.
    Frogs were Issi’s favorite animal. Once he’d caught a frog for her like this one and put it in a cage of twigs. She’d watched it till it stopped glowing, then carried it carefully back to the river and set it free.
    She was always trying to make friends with wildcreatures: with weasels and badgers and once, to her cost, a porcupine. And she adored Scram. When she was four and Scram was a puppy, Hylas could always make her laugh by shouting “Scram! Scram!”—and instead of scramming, Scram would come racing toward them, his ears flying and his tongue hanging out. Issi never got tired of it. She’d clap her hands and yell “Scram! Scram!” laughing so hard that she fell over.
    Thinking of her made Hylas feel lonelier than ever.
    From the moment Neleos had found them on the Mountain wrapped in a bearskin, it had been him and Issi against the world. Hylas had been about five; Issi about two. The old man had tried to take the bearskin, and Hylas had bitten him. And Issi had laughed…

    The Sun woke him, shining in his eyes. The raft was stuck on a sandbank. The voice of the river had changed into a distant sighing, as of some vast creature breathing in its sleep.
    Scrambling off the raft, Hylas found himself on a shore of glaring white pebbles. The river was gone. Before him shimmered water of astonishing blue that stretched all the way to the sky. Wavelets rimmed with white lapped his feet. The shallows were so clear that he could see right down to the bottom, where the waterweeds weren’t green but
purple,
and among them he glimpsed weird little round creatures that bristled with black spines, like underwater hedgehogs.
    Stooping, he touched the water with one finger. He licked it. He tasted salt.
    They know you’re coming,
the Keftian had said.
They are seeking you through their deep blue world…
    Hylas swallowed.
    He had reached the Sea.

6

    T he dolphin was restless.
    For some time he’d had a feeling that he was meant to do something, but he didn’t know what. The odd thing was, the rest of his pod didn’t feel the same.
    Usually if he felt something, so did the others. That was what it was to
be
a dolphin: You swam through a shimmering web of clicks and whistles and flickering dolphin thoughts—so that often it felt as if there weren’t many dolphins but
one,
all leaping and diving together.
    But not this time. When he tried to tell them, none of them understood, not even his mother. So now he decided to leave them for a while and see if he could find out for himself.
    At first he kept to the Edge, where the Sea was noisy and bright. He heard the spiky cries of seabirds and the hiss and fizz of foam on the shore. He sped through a forest of seaweed because he liked its slippery tickle, and listened to a shoal of bream nosing for worms in the shallows. To take a look at the island that jutted from his range, he leaped out of the Sea, and for the flick of a flipper he was in theAbove, where sounds were jagged and the Sun was yellow instead of green. But whatever he was supposed to do, it wasn’t here.
    Splashing back into the Sea, he left the restless clamor of the Edge and dived down into the beautiful Blue Deep, where the light was soft and cool, and he could hear himself click. He caught the suck and slither of an octopus, and was tempted to go after it, as octopus were his favorite prey and he enjoyed nosing them out of their holes. But the feeling of something he had to do stuck like a barnacle, and wouldn’t let go.
    As he swam deeper, the Sea grew darker and colder. He clicked faster, listening to the craggy rocks crusted with coral. Mullets fled from him in panic, and groupers grunted warnings to each other. He ignored them. Down he swam, clicking faster and faster till he reached the Black Beneath, where he couldn’t see at all, but he could