Des looked at the kraken, still tethered to the deck.
‘I’ve tried, boss. I’ve kicked him and I’ve thumped him but you said I wasn’t to do him in.’
Evil people cannot bear the sound of the hum. They feel it as a threat to all they stand for, and the kraken had been humming now for many hours.
Boris meanwhile had opened the hatch.
‘Out,’ he said. ‘Up! Only the peoples.’
One by one they came out. Fabio, Minette, the aunts … Herbert.
On deck it was cold but marvellously fresh after the stuffiness of the hold. Gulls were flying above them; it all looked so normal — except for the look in Sprott’s eyes.
‘I don’t want to see them drown, I don’t want to,’ yelled Lambert, twisting in his father’s grasp.
The children moved closer together. It was going to happen, then — and almost straight away.
Boris and Des had fetched the weights they were going to tie to their victims’ ankles; not that there was much chance that they would be able to swim to safety. The Hurricane had been steaming steadily away from the Island.
The aunts had come to stand behind the children; Etta behind Minette, Coral behind Fabio as though by some miracle they could still protect them.
Fabio and Minette had linked hands. Everything inside them seemed to have turned to stone.
Don’t let me make a fuss, Fabio was praying. Don’t let me be like Lambert.
‘We’ll start with the fat one,’ ordered Sprott. ‘Take her to the rails and get the weights on.’
Des went over to Aunt Coral.
‘Move,’ he said, prodding her with the butt of his gun — and as he did so, Fabio went mad.
‘How dare you!’ he shouted and tried to attack the bodyguard with his fists.
Sprott thought this was very funny. ‘All right, you can go first then if you’re so full of beans,’ he said, and the two thugs pinned Fabio’s arms behind his back and started to carry him to the side.
They were trying to fix weights on to his thrashing legs when the skipper put his head out of the wheelhouse.
‘Better hurry,’ he said. ‘I don’t like the look of the sky.’
There was nothing to like the look of. Not the sea, not the sky, not the surface of the water, not the clouds. Some dreadful weather was on the way.
The waves darkened, the water boiled; the sun vanished behind a mushroom cloud.
The gulls flew up screeching.
And on the deck of the Hurricane — someone began to scream.
‘Hold on to me,’ Fabio had shouted to Minette, but they were torn apart at once by the mountainous icy waves.
Minette had thought of herself as a good swimmer but this was nothing to do with swimming — she was being hurled up, then sucked down, rolled over …
And the cold was beyond belief.
All round her were broken planks and debris from the Hurricane. The ship had split in two the instant the great kraken had rammed her. She saw the roof of the boobrie’s splintered cage bobbing close by; two of the chicks were clinging to the top of it — but where was the third?
A wave broke over her head and she went under again; the weight of the water pressed her down and down; her lungs were bursting. I’m going to die, she thought, as far as she could think at all.
Then with a last thrust of her legs she reached the surface. And as she did so, she saw someone quite close to her, swimming as masterfully and strongly as if he was in a millpond rather than the raging sea.
‘Wait, I’m coming,’ called Herbert, and she reached out for him, but then another wave took her and she went under yet again and was sure she was lost. Then she felt herself pulled up and up by her hair … and found that she was clinging on to Herbert’s back and able to breathe once more.
‘Hold on tight, but don’t choke me,’ called Herbert — and set off through the waves as calmly as he had done when he was still a seal.
‘Fabio?’ she managed to ask.
But Herbert had not seen Fabio.
They passed the stoorworm and saw something large gripped tightly in the coils of his tail. The worm’s ancestors had come from the sea and Herbert wasted no time on him. He would get Aunt Coral to safety if anybody could.
A mattress swam past them, then the galley table with the third boobrie chick clinging on by his yellow feet.
‘Keep still, Aunt Etta,’ came Queenie’s high-pitched voice above the sound of the waves. ‘You mustn’t wriggle.’
The twins were holding Aunt Etta up between them as she spluttered and kicked her feet.
Hanging on to Herbert’s back took all Minette’s strength, but she was still searching desperately for Fabio.
‘Please, Herbert, we must find him.’
After he and Minette were torn apart, Fabio had sighted the lifeboat which had been thrown clear when the Hurricane sank. He managed to swim towards it … to get a hand on the gunnel … If the people inside it would help him he could pull himself up.
But the people inside it were Stanley Sprott and his crew.
Sprott looked over the side and saw the struggling boy. ‘Get rid of him,’ he said.
And as the small hand came up, Boris hit it with an oar and pushed the boy back into the water.
There was not much hope for Fabio after that. He was going down for the last time when Herbert found him.
‘Hold on to my shoulder,’ he ordered. ‘And don’t talk.’
Herbert was an amazing swimmer but he knew that to support two children all the long way back to the Island might be beyond his strength. Even a seal would not try to swim with two pups on his back.
Everyone was in difficulties. The raft on which the boobrie chicks balanced was sinking and above them the boobrie mother squawked in anguish, not knowing which of the two to pick up in her beak. The worm’s tail muscles had gone into cramp from holding up the waterlogged Aunt Coral …
Herbert measured the long way to the Island and set his teeth.
‘Come on, everybody, follow me,’ he called manfully.
One could only do one’s best.
The kraken had found his son. He cared for nothing else. He swam away from the shipwreck with the child on his back. Anger still coursed through his body. He was not the Healer of the Sea now. He was a father whose child had been hurt. Let everyone else beware for he and his son were on their way!
But after the first joy of being safe, the little kraken wriggled forward so that his mouth was right against his father’s ear, and began to talk very fast in Polar. He was explaining what had happened and how the people on the Island had tried to keep him safe.
And then he said the word which the great kraken had spoken when he first swam into the bay.
‘Children?’ said the little kraken. And again, looking back at the wreckage: ‘Children?’
But it was not really a question. It was an order. The little kraken was growing up.
And the great kraken sighed because he wanted above all to be away from the shrieks and the splintered wood of the wreckage and be in the quietness of the sea. But he heeded his son — and he turned and swam back to the wreck and to the struggling creatures trying to hold each other up in the water.
Then Minette and Fabio felt something below them … the strong living island of muscle that was the kraken’s back … and felt it rise and rise till everyone was safely gathered on it — the aunts and the creatures, the boobries in their cage … and they themselves, sliding off Herbert’s weary shoulders to feel firm ground beneath their feet.
It was an incredible, magic journey that they took after the panic and terror they had been through — floating secure and safe on the great creature’s back, until the Island was in sight, and there was no more danger and no more fear.