But it wasn’t just the special creatures, those with a touch of magic in them, who wanted to see and talk to the kraken. Everything that moved or crawled or swam wanted to be with him. Processions of sludge worms, schools of pilchards and puffer fish, platoons of lobsters and countless moon snails, all made their way towards him.
‘Is he getting enough rest?’ Aunt Etta wondered.
But when she asked the kraken he only turned his marvellous eyes towards her and said (at least she thought he said — his English was rather strange) that there was no living thing he did not welcome.
There were two people, though, who did not row out to the kraken and tell him their troubles. Minette did not ask him how to make her parents kind to each other, and Fabio did not ask him how to blow up the headmaster of Greymarsh Towers. This was partly because their past lives now seemed quite unreal to the children, but it was mostly because they were busier than they had ever been in their lives.
For the kraken wasn’t just resting. He was watching. And what he was watching was his son. Or rather, he was watching how Fabio and Minette coped with his son.
It had been difficult for the kraken, deciding what to do with his child. At first he thought he would put off his healing journey round the world till his son was older. But baby krakens grow very slowly — he would have had to wait for more than a hundred years for the child to grow up, and when he realized what a mess the world was in, he knew he couldn’t risk it.
Then he thought maybe he could leave his motherless infant in the Arctic among the walruses and polar bears and narwhals he was used to. But this plan had gone down badly with his son who wanted to travel with his father.
‘You can’t. It’s too far,’ the kraken had said.
It takes a year and a day to circle the oceans of the world and it was much too far. The baby swam slowly and often needed lifts on his father’s back and no one can really give himself to healing the world when they are worried about their child.
The kraken had heard about the Island and the caring aunts as he heard about everything, and at last he had decided to see if it was a good place to leave his son. But he had not been quite happy. Aunts were fine things but these were aunts without children and the baby kraken needed people of his own age. Or rather people who were a bit older but could remember the troubles and the games and the tantrums of being very young.
Which was why the first word he said when he arrived was ‘Children?’ and why now he watched Fabio and Minette most carefully out of his golden eyes. If they were not suitable as childminders, he meant to give up his journey and go home. Once you have children nothing matters more than their safekeeping. Every parent in the world knows that.
The baby kraken was not at all like his father. He was still soft and blobby as though his body hadn’t quite decided what was going to happen to it. Bulges came out of him sometimes, which were almost arms and legs but not the kind of arms you could do very much with, and not the kind of legs that were much use for walking. He would lose these later and become streamlined and suited to the sea, but at the moment he was rather like a large beanbag and one never knew what kind of shape he would decide to be.
And yet one could see that he was the mighty kraken’s son. He had the same large wondrous eyes, the same wide mouth which smiled easily, the same interested nostrils which seemed to hoover up the scents of land and sea.
Like his father, he too could make the creatures of the sea come to him and when he rested in a rockpool, the barnacles and whelks and brittlestars all seemed to glow with happiness and health.
But there was one thing he could not do.
‘Can he hum?’ Fabio asked on the first day.
They were having lunch. Lambert had bolted his food and rushed back to his room where he lay on his bed with the curtains drawn. He still believed that he was being drugged and that the strange creatures he was seeing were not really there, but seeing a whole island that wasn’t really there was driving him a little crazy.
Aunt Etta shook her head. ‘He’s too young. A kraken humming is a bit like a boy’s voice breaking; it just happens when he’s ready. It’s a pity, because that’s how krakens speak to each other across distances.’
‘Is there any way of teaching him to do it sooner?’ asked Minette. ‘Could his father …?’
But Aunt Etta said, no — it would just happen when the time was right. She didn’t add that his father was worried, knowing that there was no way his child could call him once he went away.
But if he couldn’t hum, the kraken was beginning to speak. The trouble for Fabio and Minette was what he spoke. With his father he spoke Polar but other languages got mixed up with it, and when he started off in English he quickly wandered off into Norwegian or Swedish or even Finnish which the children did not understand at all.
But Fabio himself had needed to learn English not so long ago and he remembered that what he had learnt first was the name of things to eat.
After that it was easy. For the young kraken did not just feed on the plankton in seawater like his father — he was still growing and needed solid food which he ground up with his gums rather like an old man with no teeth.
‘This is a sausage,’ Fabio would say, holding up one of Art’s bangers and the kraken would repeat ‘Soss’, or ‘Spag’ when it was spaghetti of which he was very fond, and of course he soon learn to say ‘More’ or ‘No!’ which all young creatures learn to say very early.
By now he was letting the children play with him in the water, throwing a ball or pretending to hide behind a rock. He would even follow them in the dinghy — but always after a short time he went back to his father and stayed very close to his side, for the bond between those two was very, very strong. And though the great kraken was more certain with every day that passed that he had found the right place to leave his son, his heart was heavy at the thought of the parting that must soon come.
Chapter Fourteen
The next island on which Stanley Sprott landed did not have any naked people on it. It did not have any people on it at all. What it had on it was sheep.
They came to it through driving sheets of rain. It was the wettest rain they had ever come across and it looked as though it must stop soon because the sky would have emptied itself, but it didn’t. And on the low-lying, sodden island were hundreds — no, thousands — of soaking sheep.
‘There’s nowhere to land,’ said the skipper.
But when they’d circled the island twice they found a narrow inlet and, chugging up it, they saw a shingle bay where the dinghy could be beached.
No one had wanted to land among the pink nudists and no one wanted to land among the wet sheep.
‘The boy won’t be there,’ said Des. ‘No one could last on this dump.’
But Mr Sprott had a bee in his bonnet about a honeycomb of underground caves and tunnels full of mad aunts who were holding Lambert.
‘They might have brought the sheep to put people off,’ he said, ‘or they might come up and shoot them for meat’ — and he ordered the Hurricane to put down her anchor.
Leaving Casimir to guard the boat they rowed to the island and went ashore.
It was not a pleasant place. Sheep are not often cheerful once they are grown up and these sheep were the wettest, gloomiest sheep you could imagine. They stood pressed together, the water running down their noses, giving off a smell of wet wool and lanolin. Some of them had foot rot and though sheep-pats are not as squelchy as cow-pats, they are not agreeable to walk on in the rain.