The Tide Knot by Helen Dunmore Read Free Book Online

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 grown only 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’l 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 swel 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 seabed. 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 seabed. It’s not a reef, or a dead whale, or anything that belongs to Ingo. It’s something that belongs to the 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 onto the hidden reef. The entire ship judders with the shock. Metal