They watched her slide down the cliff face, silent and stubborn, keeping her body flat as it slipped round the curve of the stone and out of sight, her red curls bright against the slick dark rock.
By the time they had climbed up to the path, where they could see the whirlpool, all trace of Navy had vanished.
18
The Giant’s Almanac
Once when he was small, climbing on a rock at high tide by the sea, Fitz had fallen several metres on to the tide pools below, landing heavily on his back and smashing his head against flat stones, pebbles and limpets. He had bled from his head in thick swells, and he wasn’t able to move his arm – but until Clare had found him and picked him up, he had felt none of it. Numb, tired, as empty as a cloth hanging from a line in a full wind, he had seemed to himself not so much paralysed as pliant. The rush of the surf that crashed on nearby rocks, the calls of gulls and guillemots, Clare’s cries when she found him – everything had seemed in his shock distant, as if a story told him about his life, rather than his own experience. It had seemed to befall him as if already, in the happening, a memory.
As Fitz and Mr Ahmadi stood on the short cliff above the swirling water, the dark mountains in the darkening east could have crumbled and sunk in the sea, and Fitz wouldn’t have noticed, or cared. The old shock, the familiar sense of unfamiliarity, stole over him as the chill before a fever, both sudden and profound.
She’s gone.
It was then he heard a reedy whine, as of an engine.
Mr Ahmadi seized his arm, pinching it so tight that his fingers seemed to press the bone. He shoved Fitz south along the ledge.
‘Run.’
Fitz fumbled for words as he staggered on the loose rocks of the ledge. ‘Why?’ he managed. Or perhaps it was, ‘What?’
‘Run,’ repeated Mr Ahmadi. He was close behind, too close, as if he were ready to run straight through the boy blocking his way. ‘And keep your head low. They might not have seen us.’
Who might not have seen us?
And then Fitz realized that the sound was the drone of a motor, skipping through the sea swells, and that it was near, driving at them across the water, with red and white lights like eyes searching for them, blazing at them with anger through the enveloping dusk.
‘Who is it?’ he shouted through the wind. The rhythmic noise, broken by waves, was resolving in the chill, wet air, rebounding off the cliffside with growing intensity. As they passed beneath an overhang slick with dark earth, a few small rocks shuddered from above and rained around their feet.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Mr Ahmadi, breathing hard. ‘But I’d rather not find out.’
The boat was very close now – fifteen, maybe ten seconds from the shore. Fitz tried to lengthen his stride, leaping from one sure footing to another, watching them unfold before him in the gloom. At this speed, everything depended on hitting stable, dry footholds with every step, so he gave the ground his full attention, blind and deaf to anything else happening around him.
Mr Ahmadi had to call him twice before he heard.
‘Stop.’
Pulling Fitz down to the ground, Mr Ahmadi cast his cape over their faces as the boat came round the island’s shore. Fitz was aware of a searching light, but it wasn’t particularly close to them.
‘Now, go. We’re almost at the south slope. The tide is down, and the boat should be high on the sand by now.’ Mr Ahmadi placed his hands on Fitz’s shoulders, and gave him a gentle shove.
That was when they heard her.
It was Navy’s voice – high, thin, distant, but unmistakable. She was calling for help.
They didn’t exchange a single word. Without pausing to breathe, much less take their bearings, both Mr Ahmadi and Fitz scrambled downslope, staying low and gripping anything that would hold. Leg over leg they shimmied and shuffled, scraping and bruising themselves in their haste to get to the sea.
Her voice came again, more distant this time. They were standing on the rocks, metres from the lapping sea.
Fitz looked south, towards the warm red light of the sun setting beyond a little south-facing bluff. Mr Ahmadi had immediately started north. They both froze, listening.
The horizon had burst into flame, and over a low band of clouds great pools of colour – orange, blue, yellow, pinks and purples that pulsed in and out of one another – rioted in the sky. Great open-winged gliders soared in the slate heights of the evening, birds undulating the vague distance between the ocean’s deep phrase and the sky’s deeper silence, between the day’s bright things and the night’s inestimable voids. Fitz’s ears yearned into that space and action, striving to hover everywhere at once, to lie listening upon the whole vault of the island as sensitive to its every rustle and twitch as the wings of those birds, coasting on the invisible engines of the air.
Albatross. The diver.
Again she cried. Her voice seemed to bounce on the water, dispersing like the faint light on the small waves.
‘I don’t know,’ said Fitz. His heart was heaving, and his tongue hung in his mouth like a withered thing. He felt terrified.
‘What did you hear?’
