Chapter 9 #2
Jasper only mentioned three Canna groups: his own, Ruth’s and another. So Gideon’s must have been the one whose leader attacked Ruth.
‘How long were you on Canna before you went to Bletchley Park?’ I ask him.
‘I lost track of the time,’ he says quietly. ‘But I was just a boy when they sent me here.’
I hear the quiet peeping of nesting birds.
‘We should start walking,’ I say.
‘See the church?’ Gideon says. He points to the left, where an old stone church stands in the moonlight. ‘The Stepstones are on the other side of those hills.’ He gestures in the opposite direction. ‘We can’t cross them in the dark.’
‘You mean we’re supposed to wait here for Krasimir to pick us off one by one?’ Serena whispers.
‘Would you rather fall to your death?’ Gideon replies.
‘Quite frankly, yes.’
I shift uncomfortably in the wet grass, shivering. ‘We’ll go as soon as it’s light.’
Serena turns on her radio and soon, a monotone voice, listing off names, fills my ears.
‘Lucy Cartwright. James Fowler. Rebecca Swiftalon. Joshua Bennett.’
‘Missing rebels?’ I ask her quietly.
‘Dead rebels,’ she says. ‘This is the daily death toll. See why Hollingsworth thinks spirits need lifting?’
We lie still in the night, staring up at the countless stars.
As the sounds of breathing slow, I wonder how any of them can sleep with Krasimir nearby.
Atlas’s hand finds mine and I roll over so that I’m closer to him.
The moon disappears behind a cloud, turning the darkness pitch black.
I reach up to his face and trace the shape of his high cheekbones, his nose, his jaw prickling with stubble.
Would I be able to recognise him blind, with nothing but touch?
I don’t think I would, and it occurs to me that a month at Bletchley Park is not enough time to get to know a person.
There are still so many questions I don’t know the answer to.
Why he trained to be a priest. Why he became a rebel. Why he chose me.
Will he make the same choice this time round?
Is it selfish of me to want him to?
He catches my fingers. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Trying to decipher who you are.’
‘I’m a code to be cracked too, am I?’ he says.
‘A true enigma,’ I reply.
He buries his face in my hair and I close my eyes. Screeches sound across the island as I try to work out my feelings for Atlas. Is this love? Or infatuation? Or do I merely crave someone to cling to beneath dragon-filled skies?
The cold morning air wakes me, creeping into the collar of my coat and stiffening my joints. Atlas is gone. I sit up and scan the graveyard until I see him in another field, sitting by a small stream. He’s staring up into the sky, seemingly lost in thought.
The first sunlight streams over the horizon as we climb into the hills with rumbling stomachs.
‘What were you doing out in the field by yourself this morning?’ I ask Atlas.
‘Praying,’ he says. ‘Why?’
I feign a casual shrug. ‘I thought you’d chosen not to be a priest.’
Atlas snorts. ‘You don’t have to be a man of the cloth to have a relationship with God, Viv.’
‘Good,’ I say, glancing at him from beneath my eyelashes. ‘Because the swallow on your arm suits you much better than a white collar.’
He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. My attempt to flirt suddenly seems ridiculous. I feel my cheeks burn. What’s happening to me?
There’s a flash of white as a bird plummets towards us.
‘Bloody skuas!’ Gideon shouts, waving his arms as it attacks him.
‘Skuas?’
The bird dives again as Gideon plunges his hands into a nest in the grass and pulls out an egg.
‘Breakfast,’ he says, passing it to me.
I stare at the brown egg in my palm.
‘Only the cold ones,’ Gideon tells Marquis as he reaches into another nest. ‘If they’re warm, there are likely chicks inside.’
The nests of the great white birds litter the hillside.
‘I’m not eating a raw egg,’ Serena says.
‘Starve, then,’ Gideon replies.
He cracks the egg on a rock and tips the fat, viscous yolk into his mouth.
I hand my egg to Atlas and shake my head in disgust. We keep walking, climbing with the sun, until the hill flattens out into a cliff that looms over the sea.
I see merlins and orchid flowers and Grayling butterflies, wildlife I only know the names of thanks to Clawtail’s journal.
‘Are those puffins?’ Atlas asks.
The black and white birds zip to and fro between the cliff edge and the sea, their orange beaks stuffed with tiny, silver fish.
‘Clawtail wrote that the Hebridean Wyverns feast on puffins,’ I say. ‘Maybe that means we’re getting close.’
Soon, the landscape changes again. The cliffs begin to slope downwards so that we’re closer to the sea and I see something circling in the frothy white waves.
‘A wyrm,’ I tell Atlas.
‘I once heard that the Loch Ness Monster is actually a wyrm that got fed up dealing with the bad-tempered Scots and retreated to the water forever,’ he says quietly.
‘Aren’t the Scots known for being friendly and honest?’ Serena says. ‘There’s a reason theirs is the country with the most rebels.’
‘I’d say so,’ Marquis says. ‘Just look at Karim.’
I give him a sad smile. Marquis’s Scottish boyfriend is the gentlest boy I know.
‘The Stepstones,’ Gideon says.
The slopes lead into a vast valley, miles of green hills shot through by streams and dotted with the remnants of ancient stone walls and volcanic rock. Canna would be beautiful if it wasn’t a feeding ground.
‘How are we supposed to find wyvern tunnels from up here?’ Marquis says as he puffs on a cigarette. ‘Chumana could have done a bit of echolocating for us, but I’d say you’ve thrown a bit of a spanner in the works when it comes to asking her for favours, wouldn’t you, cousin?’ He winks at me.
A bit of echolocating.
I feel a burst of energy as I pull the loquisonus machine out of its case.
‘The wyverns must echolocate underground, no? If we take the loquisonus down to the Stepstones, I can listen and determine where the calls are loudest. We might be able to follow the sound until we find them.’
‘Brilliant,’ Atlas says. His face lights up. ‘You’re brilliant.’
I flush with pleasure. It feels addictive, having his eyes on me.
‘There’ll be interference,’ Gideon says. ‘From the other dragons on Canna.’
I nod. ‘We can try to avoid that by going to the lowest point of the valley.’
‘Look for a river, then,’ Marquis says. ‘The bottom of a valley usually has one, or at least an active stream.’
‘There,’ says Serena, pointing to a long, blue line of water.
We venture down towards it, the sun warm on our backs.
‘Let me help you,’ Atlas says.
He doesn’t wait for my reply before reaching for the loquisonus machine, his fingers brushing mine.
I count the moles on his face as he sets the machine on the ground by the river, then crouches over it to plug the headphones in.
What if he does decide to be a priest? I think suddenly.
He could still change his mind, and what would we be then?
Strangers? Lovers? Friends who kiss against a tree from time to time? Of course not.
No. He wouldn’t allow it.
Atlas King would never agree to loving my body but not my soul.
I take the headphones from him and sit by the water to listen.
My ears fill with the clicks and trills of echolocating dragons, each one as loud as the next.
I shake my head and stand up with the machine, moving further along the stream.
My heartbeat slows as I close my eyes. I let my mind search for the calls it recognises, then follow the ones it doesn’t. The ones I haven’t heard before.
‘What does it feel like?’ Atlas says. ‘To understand them?’
I don’t open my eyes. ‘It feels like . . . like listening to an unintelligible stream of sound, except that one day the sound becomes several distinct sounds, imbued with enough meaning that suddenly the stream is replaced with words and phrases that make sense. And you can never hear them as gibberish again, no matter how hard you try.’
But the calls of Canna’s dragons are almost impossible to differentiate. I didn’t study these in the glasshouse. They probably refer to the hunting of puffins or the rising tide rather than the comings and goings of life at Bletchley Park. It’s like learning a new language.
I step over another small stream as one of the calls gets louder, then quieter. The clear, oscillating vibration of them stops me in my tracks. This echolocation sounds strange. I step back over the stream and the volume increases again.
‘There,’ I say, nodding to the spot where I was just standing. I glance up into the sky but see no dragon. ‘Maybe there’s something below.’
‘There’s no feathers or fur or dragon dung,’ Marquis says.
Gideon shakes his head. ‘No tracks or discarded prey.’
I keep listening, the calls still loud in my ears as I walk along the stream.
Something glints in the grass. I turn it over with the toe of my boot.
It’s a piece of transparent, orange rock, the size of a pebble.
As I kick the grass back I see more of them, tiny treasures buried in the ground. My boot meets Serena’s.
‘Someone’s turned up the earth here,’ she says.
We follow the stream for another half-mile, deeper into the valley as I try to concentrate on not losing the clearest calls I’m hearing among all the others.
They vibrate in my ears, then die, then stutter to life again.
They sound like a faint yet persistent music.
The valley is as still and crisp as the untouched landscape of a fairy tale, yet the ultrasonic sound bursting in my ears tells me it’s full of life.
But where is that life hiding?
‘Stop,’ Serena says.
The stream snakes into a small pool of water surrounded by trees. At the far end is a tall cliff face with a waterfall crashing down from above it. We pause, hot and breathless, as Atlas walks around the pool and lays a hand on the wet wall of the cliff.
‘There’s no tunnel here,’ he says.