This was not the curious, carefree Dylan who had swum into the blacksmith’s hammer strike, nor the terrifying Dylan who had borne down on Gruff and Mat with such pain-filled anger. This Dylan looked sad and tired.
His sunken cheeks and the hollows around his eyes showed the curves of his skull. His lips were thin, cracked lines. His eyes held a sea that was heavy and turgid; a pre-storm sea. On his chest was a deep, congealed wound, lined with torn scales and broken bone. The dark brown-black of old blood mingled with the shine of oil, and scraps of a plastic bag and an old fishing net were embedded in the half-healed, never-closed wound. It smelled horrible; the sweet stench of decay. Dylan’s drawn face was that of a person so used to pain they cannot remember a time before it.
Gruff didn’t know what to do or say. When he glanced behind him he found himself alone. The blacksmith was gone.
‘I…’ Gruff crouched down on the Sleeper so that he was closer to Dylan. Rain pattered down around them. The morgen bobbed in the swell, which seemed calmer around the rock, though Gruff could see the waves were still wild beyond.
What could he say? Please don’t swamp the island? Please take your anger and pain out into the middle of the ocean, far away?
When he spoke, what Gruff actually found himself saying was: ‘Dw i isio helpu chi.’ I want to help you.
Dylan’s cracked lips parted and a layered sound came out, a low groan beneath a strange breathy whistle.
‘Um…’ Gruff said, unsure whether this noise was a good or bad sign. Was this morgen language? Could Dylan not speak with a human voice?
Dylan slowly raised one arm – his right arm, the side without the wound – towards Gruff. His fingers were long and thin and joined with webbing that had once been sturdy but was now ragged and raw.
Did he want Gruff to shake his hand? Gruff paused to see if Dylan would do or say anything else. He did not, so Gruff leant down and placed his hand into Dylan’s in the strangest handshake ever. Dylan’s fingers were cold, but not slimy like he’d imagined. The morgen’s grip was firm. It sent a wash of water up Gruff’s arm, calmer than what he sensed from Mat.
‘No one,’ Dylan said, in a voice as ragged as his hand, ‘has spoken to me in a long time.’ He let Gruff’s hand go and dropped back down into the water so that his gills were covered. When he spoke again, his voice was a little less hoarse. ‘Did Gofannon teach you to call me?’
Gruff hesitated. He had never asked the blacksmith’s name. Was she Gofannon? ‘The blacksmith showed me how. She’s really sorry. She never meant to hurt you.’
Dylan’s lips pulled down and his teeth flashed in a grimace. ‘I do not blame her. We are as cursed as one another.’
‘How can I help?’ Gruff asked. ‘Please, tell me how!’
‘I’m sorry. I cannot tell you what I do not know.’
‘Then why has she shown me how to talk to you? I don’t know what to do!’
‘You are doing everything you can,’ Dylan said. ‘I am … talking. I see you. We have taken hands. The more I remember of what I once was, the less dangerous I will be when I am not myself.’
Gruff’s heart sank. ‘So that’s it? The storm’ll happen, but it might not be as bad as it could’ve been?’
‘I’m … so sorry.’ Dylan’s face twisted and he began to turn away.
‘No! Please stay.’ Gruff searched for something to say. Something to keep Dylan talking and remembering. ‘My friend is a morgen, I think. She’s got gills.’
A spark of interest flashed in Dylan’s tired eyes. ‘A morgen? There hasn’t been another here for many years. Will she choose the water?’
‘I … don’t know.’ Gruff remembered his conversation with Mat in the farmhouse kitchen, how she had told him that being in the sea was like coming home. ‘Will you please look out for her?’ he said. ‘She swam away, it’s like she’s forgotten who she is.’
‘She must forget to discover,’ Dylan said. ‘The memories will return. Eventually.’
‘Eventually?’
‘It can take some years.’
Gruff’s stomach turned over. Losing Mat. That’s what it would be, if she turned full morgen. Her family would lose her. He would lose her. She would be gone. Mat had said she felt hiraeth for the sea. Would she really leave and not look back?
‘Mat’s learning to be an oceanographer,’ he said. ‘She’s going to be a really good one.’ Don’t go, Mat.
Dylan turned full circle in the water, scanning the waves. ‘I will look out for her.’ He frowned. ‘So long as I am myself. So long as I remember.’
Gruff’s eyes were drawn again to the terrible, rubbish-filled wound. ‘Let me help,’ he said. ‘Maybe I can get some of that stuff out?’
Dylan flinched away as though Gruff had been about to touch him, though Gruff had not moved. ‘There is nothing you can do. I am immortal, and yet I have a mortal wound. It will never heal. If you touch it … the pain that would cause … I could drown you. Not from choice, but it would happen. Do you understand? I … forget myself.’
Gruff drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, shivering in the rain. He felt useless. ‘We do beach litter-picking all the time here,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry the sea is so full of rubbish.’
‘You apologise on behalf of your species.’
‘I suppose so, yeah.’
The hammer caught Gruff’s eye, lying on the rock next to him. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand absent-mindedly. ‘How can a sword cut water?’ he asked. ‘And how does that help in a storm?’
Dylan made a choking noise and Gruff looked up in alarm. The morgen’s eyes were trained on the hammer. His thin lips drew back and Gruff saw that Dylan’s teeth ended in sharp points, like those of a seal. A high, whistling hiss erupted from his chest, his teeth parting and the rain glinting on those terrible canines.
‘I won’t hurt you!’ Gruff yelped, leaping to his feet and taking a step back. He held the hammer behind him, out of sight, but the damage was done.
Dylan dived beneath the waves with the scream of a wounded animal and a great leap of water burst up, battering Gruff with stinging droplets.
The bubble of calm was gone. The wind and rain and spray hit Gruff with full fury and he saw a great wave on its way, pulsing up from below as though there had been an eruption underwater. Dylan was frightened and angry, and the sea was responding.
Abandoning his rucksack, Gruff turned and leapt for the sixth Sleeper as the explosion of water roared down behind him. He retreated as fast as he could, jumping from stone to stone, his trainers slipping on the slick, soaked surfaces. The rain pummelled him from above and the sea clawed from below.
Gruff splashed down onto the sand of the beach, water up to his chest. The swell tried to knock him off his feet, but he set himself firm and waded through it. The water was at his waist and then his knees and then his ankles, and finally he was out and running on rain-soaked sand. Only when he reached the great gash in the sea wall, caused by the passing of the seventh Sleeper, did he turn and look back out to the stones. He saw the blacksmith, crouching there, and she held in her hand something that glinted even in the dull grey storm-light.
It was the sword hilt.
It was beginning again.
Gofannon the blacksmith and Dylan Ail Don the morgen, trapped in time and forced to relive a terrible accident. Dylan would receive his wound once more.
But this time the storm had already begun.