Chapter Twenty-Four: Of Mermaids and Gillyweed
Days passed and Harish still had not received a reply from either Voldemort or Sirius. As it began to get closer and closer to the 24th of February, Harish began to worry, and wonder if the owl he had used had gotten lost or something. Time began to fly much like it had before the first task and Harish still had no letter.
It was as though someone had bewitched all of the clocks in Hogwarts to go extra fast. There was a week to go before February 24th (there was still time)…Another Apparition lesson had passed and Fred had managed to Apparate…there were five days to go (his father was bound to send a letter soon)…Professor Moody made them cast very complex hexes nonverbally on rodents…
Finally, when there were three days left before the Second Task, Harish received a very short letter from his father.
Don't worry. I have it covered.
He had it covered? What was that supposed to mean? Did he have Gillyweed? How was he planning on getting it to Harish? Then, the next day Harish received a letter from Sirius. This one was just as short, but had a slightly different note to it.
Send date of next Hogsmeade weekend by return owl.
"Weekend after next," Fred said, as both of the twins had read the note over his shoulder.
"Here," George muttered. "Use my quill."
And Harish scrawled the date of the next Hogsmeade weekend on the back of the slip of parchment and sent it back with the owl that had brought it.
"What does he want to know —"
"About the next Hogsmeade weekend for?" the twins asked.
Harish shrugged. He was still pondering what Voldemort meant, and was still very worried as there were two days until the Second Task and he still did not have any Gillyweed.
By the evening before the Second Task, Harish had sent his father multiple letters about what he meant, but had received no reply. He finally resigned himself to trusting that the Dark Lord knew what he was doing and he would just have to have faith in him. Still, he was too nervous to do any of his homework. He sat in the common room, staring at the fire.
Everyone else went to bed early with an exception for the twins, who were in the library figuring out a new joke product. Draco and Daphne tried to convince Harish to go to bed, but they were unsuccessful.
"Go on down, Daphne," Draco said. "I'll talk to him."
Daphne nodded and went to her own dormitory. Then, Draco said, "Come on Harish you'll need your strength for tomorrow."
"I won't be able to sleep anyway," Harish protested. "I'm just too worried. What if I show up tomorrow for the task, unprepared and looking like a fool?"
"You won't," Draco reassured him. "Your father is a smart man. He's probably just been busy or something."
Just then, the entrance to the common room opened and the twins came in.
"Draco, Professor McGonagall wants you," George informed him.
"Why?" Draco asked.
They shrugged.
"She was looking sort of grim, though," George replied.
"Grim?" Draco asked, walking out of the common room.
The twins then rounded on Harish.
Without a word to him, they seized his arms and dragged him off the couch.
"Fine, fine!" he snapped. "I'll go to bed!"
And he followed them down the stairs to their dormitory and went to bed. He drifted asleep some time past one o'clock in the morning.
Harish woke up to someone poking him.
"Stop it," he mumbled, rolling over and planting his face in his pillow. "That hurts."
"Young Master Harish must wake up, sir!"
"Stop poking me—"
"Dobby must poke Master Harish, sir, he must wake up!"
Harish opened his eyes. His house-elf, Dobby, was standing to the side of his bed. His hand was clenched around something that was dripping onto the floor.
"Dobby brought this for you!" Dobby said happily, unclenching his hand and holding out something that looked like a dripping pile of worms.
"Is that—?"
"Gillyweed, sir!" Dobby chirped happily. "Master Blake told me to bring it to Master Harish, and Dobby was very glad to bring it, sir, for Master Blake said that you would need it to stay alive!"
Harish took the Gillyweed from Dobby and stuffed it in his pocket.
"How much time have I got? Do you know?"
"Master Harish is having one hour before his task."
Harish breathed a sigh of relief. He would have plenty of time to get down there.
"Thanks, Dobby," he said.
"Master Harish is a good, kind master!" Dobby squeaked happily.
"Yeah, yeah," Harish said as he pulled on a pair of sweat pants under his robes. "Could you help me find my knife I got from Sirius?"
Dobby snapped his fingers and the knife appeared in his hand.
"Here you goes, sir!"
Harish took it and held it in his teeth.
"Fanks," he said again before dashing off down to the lake.
He figured he would need the knife, because he knew it unlocked any lock and he had no idea whether the merpeople would protect the object they stole from him or not.
When he arrived at the lake, he discovered that Krum was already there, wearing a pair of swim trunks. Fleur was not there yet. Harish took off his robes, his socks, and his shoes and stuffed them into his bag. He made sure that the Gillyweed was in the pocket of his sweat pants and took the knife out of his mouth and put it in his other pocket.
"You boys ready?" Bagman asked.
Both Harish and Krum nodded. Fleur showed up a minute later. Bagman then began moving along the champions and spacing them each ten feet apart from the other. Harish held his wand ready as he waited for the task to start.
"Sonorous!" Bagman said and his voice boomed across the lake. "Well, all our champions are ready for the second task, which will start on my whistle. They have precisely one hour to recover what has been taken from them. One…" Harish pulled the Gillyweed out of his pocket. "Two…" he stuffed it in his mouth and began to chew vigorously. It was oddly rubbery. "Three!"
Harish swallowed with much difficulty and began wading into the water, waiting for something to happen. The water was so cold he felt the skin on his leg searing as though it were on fire. He was waist deep when he suddenly realized he couldn't breathe. It felt as though and invisible pillow had been pressed on his nose and mouth. He felt the side of his neck and discovered that he had gills. Without pausing to think, he did the only thing that made sense in that moment—he shoved his wand into his pocket and dove forward into the water.
The first gulp of icy water felt like the breath of life. His head stopped spinning. The teen took another great gulp of water and felt it pass smoothly through his gills, sending oxygen back to his brain. He stretched out his hands in front of him and looked at them. They looked ghostly and green underwater and had become webbed. He twisted around to look at his bare feet—they were webbed too.
The water didn't feel icy anymore, either, Harish realized as he kicked his legs, propelling himself forward with much more thrust than usual. The teen guessed that it was because of the flippers. He also noticed that he could see very clearly and no longer felt the need to blink. Harish soon had swum so far into the lake that he could no longer see the bottom. He flipped over and dove into its depths.
Silence pressed in on his ears as he soared over a strange, dark, and foggy landscape. He could only see about ten feet around him, so that as he sped through the water new scenes seemed to loom suddenly out of the darkness. He swam deeper and deeper, out toward the middle of the lake, his eyes wide and staring through the eerily gray-lit water around him to the shadows beyond where the water became opaque.
Small fish flitted past him like silver darts. Once or twice he thought he saw something larger moving ahead of him, but when he got nearer, he discovered it to be nothing but a large blackened log, or a dense clump of weed. There was no sign of any of the other champions, merpeople, or larger sea creatures.
Light green weed stretched ahead of him as far as he could see, two feet deep, like a meadow of very overgrown grass. Harish was staring ahead of him, trying to discern shapes through the gloom… and then without warning, something grabbed his ankle.
Harish twisted around to see a grindylow, a small, horned water demon, poking out the weed, its long fingers clutching Harish's leg very tightly, its pointed fangs bared. Harish stuck his webbed hand into his pocket and fumbled for his wand. By the time he had grasped it, two more grindylows had risen out of the gloom, seized his trouser legs, and were attempting to drag him down.
"Relashio!" Harish shouted, except no sound came out…A large bubble issued from his mouth and his wand, instead of emitting sparks, released a jet of boiling water that left angry red patches on the grindylows' arms. Harish pulled his ankle out of the grindylow's grip and swam as fast as he could, occasionally sending more jets of boiling water over his shoulder. Every now and then he felt one of the grindylows snatch at his foot again, and he kicked out, hard. He felt his foot connect with a horned skull and turned around to see a dazed grindylow drifting down toward the weeds.
Harish slowed down a little, slipped his wand into his pocket, and looked around, listening again. He turned full circle in the water, the silence pressing harder than ever against his eardrums. He knew he must be even deeper in the lake now, but nothing was moving but the rippling weed.
"How are you getting on?"
Harish thought he was going to have a heart attack. It was a good thing he had gills, because he was sure that if he hadn't, that he would have swallowed a huge mouthful of water. He whipped around and saw Moaning Myrtle floating hazily in front of him, gazing at him through her thick, pearly glasses.
"Myrtle!" Harish exclaimed in surprise, but no sound escaped. Just an especially large bubble. Harish's eyes narrowed in annoyance and made a mental note that he shouldn't try to say anything else. Moaning Myrtle giggled at him.
"You want to try over there!" she said, pointing. "I won't come with you…I don't like them much…"
Harish gave her a thumbs-up to show that he understood what she said, and swam in the direction she had pointed. He was careful to swim a bit higher above the weed to avoid any more grindylows that might be lurking in there.
He swam for what felt like at least twenty minutes. He was passing over vast expanses of black mud now, which swirled murkily as he disturbed the water. Then, at long last, he could hear faint singing.
"An hour long you have to look,
And recover what we took…"
Harish swam faster and soon saw a large rock emerge out of the muddy water ahead. It had paintings of merpeople on it; they were carrying spears and chasing what looked like the giant squid. Harish swam on past the rock, following the mersong.
"…your time's half gone, so tarry not
Lest what you seek stays here to rot…"
A cluster of crude stone dwellings stained with algae loomed suddenly out of the gloom on all sides. Here and there at the dark windows, Harish could make out faces. They were gray with dark green hair falling around them. Their eyes were as yellow as their broken teeth, and they wore tick ropes of pebbles around their necks. They leered at Harish as he swam past and he sneered back. One or two of them emerged from their caves to watch him better, their powerful, silver fish tails beating the water, spears clutched in their hands.
Harish sped on, staring around, and soon the dwellings became more numerous; there were gardens of weed around some of them, and he even saw a pet grindylow tied to a stake outside on door. Merpeople were emerging on all sides now, watching him eagerly, pointing at his webbed hands and gills, talking behind their hands to each other. Harish sped around the corner and a very strange sight met his eyes.
A whole crowd of merpeople were floating in front of the houses that lined what looked like an underwater version of a town square. A choir of merpeople were singing in the middle, calling the champions toward them, and behind them rose a crude sort of statue; a gigantic merperson hewn from a boulder. Three people were bound tightly to its stone tail.
On the left was the girl that Krum had taken to the dance, her black locks floating around her face. In between her and a tiny girl with clouds of silvery hair (which Harish guessed must be Fleur's sister) was a boy. His eyes were shut and his blonde hair was loose and swaying in the water. It was Draco. So that was what McGonagall had wanted him for the previous night.
Harish swam forward and took the pocket knife Sirius had given him out of his pocket. He pulled out a sharp knife out of it and hacked the rope that was tied to Draco's ankles. Once he was free, he began floating toward the surface, still appearing to be unconscious.
Harish grabbed him and began to pull him up to the surface. It was very difficult, as Draco was fully clothed and his robes were making him seem twice as heavy as usual, as they were full of water. Harish kicked and kicked, and he looked down and saw that there were no longer webs on his feet. He look up and saw that the surface was no more than ten feet away.
It suddenly became a lot harder to breathe, and Harish was finding that the air was a lot wetter than it had been previously. At five feet to go, Harish felt his neck and discovered that the gills were gone. He held his breath. As the teen's lungs began searing in pain and all of his muscle's began to protest, his head finally broke the surface of the water and he gasped in, cold air filling his lungs. His wet face stung from the sheer coldness of the air. Harish looked around to see that Draco had woken up and was swimming toward the shore.
The crowd in the stands was making a great deal of noise. People were shouting and screaming, they all seemed to be on their feet. Harish clambered out of the water shakily after Draco and Madam Pomfrey bustled over.
"Come here, you," she said, seizing the two boys and pulled them over to where Fleur was sitting, huddled under a blanket. She wrapped them in blankets and forced a measure of a very hot potion down their throats. Steams gushed out of the two teens' ears.
"Gabrielle!" Fleur said to Harish. "My leetle sister! Did you see 'er? Is she all right?"
"She's fine," Harish replied. "I don't think Dumbledore will let any of them drown, don't you worry."
He hoped that this would silence Fleur, but she seemed to be really chatty.
"It was ze grindylows…zey attacked me…"
"Oh, yeah," Harish said. "They attacked me too. I used 'relashio.' It worked rather well."
"So did your father send you the Gillyweed?" Draco asked.
"Yes," Harish replied, laughing as he remembered how needlessly worried he had been. "Dobby brought some to me this morning."
"You almost missed ze deadline," Fleur informed him.
"I know," Harish replied. "When I got to where the captives where held, the merpeople were singing about how half of our hour was up. And it took at least five minutes to free Draco."
"Look!" Draco exclaimed. "There's Krum!"
And, sure enough, they could see Krum emerge out of the water. He was helping his girlfriend out of the water, who kept slipping on stones and moss. After they had reached the shore, dozens of merpeople emerged, smiling. Several of them were helping Gabrielle get to shore, as it she was having trouble swimming.
As soon as Fleur spotted her sister, she rushed over and helped her out of the water. Then, she and her sister began gabbing in French. Dumbledore walked over and talked to the chief, a fierce looking mermaid. She was making screeching noises and Dumbledore was talking back and forth with her. It seemed as though Dumbledore could speak Mermish.
Finally, he straightened up, turned to his fellow judges, and said, "A conference before we give the marks, I think."
The judges went into a huddle. Madam Pomfrey had gone over to treat Gabrielle, as she had already given a Pepper-up Potion to Krum and his lady friend.
Bagman's magically magnified voice finally boomed across the lake once more, making all of the champions jump, and causing the crowd in the stands to go very quiet.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached our decision. Merchieftaintess Murus has told us exactly what happened at the bottom of the lake and we have therefore decided to award marks out of fifty for each of the champions, as follows…
"Fleur Delacour, though she demonstrated excellent use of the Bubble-Head Chard, was attacked by grindylows as she approached her goal, and failed to retrieve her hostage. We award her twenty-five points."
All of the students in the stands applauded politely.
"I deserved zero," Fleur said throatily, shaking her silvery hair.
"Harish Blake, who used Gillyweed to great effect, was the first to return with his hostage with only five minutes to spare." Enormous cheers rose from the Slytherin crowd and some other Hogwarts students as well. Draco clapped him on the back. "We award him forty-seven points."
"Finally, Viktor Krum used an incomplete form of Transfiguration, which was nevertheless effective, and was second to return with his hostage. We award him forty points."
Karkaroff clapped particularly hard, looking very superior.
"The third and final task will take place at dusk on the twenty-fourth of June," Bagman continued. "The champions will be notified of what is coming precisely one month beforehand. Thank you all for your support of the champions."
Harish smiled, now that the task was finally over. Madam Pomfrey herded all of the champions and their hostages back up to the castle to change into dry clothes. Now Harish had the reassurance that he would be told what was coming in advance for the next task.
Harish walked up to the castle happily and the rest of his friends were waiting on him when he and Draco arrived in the common room. They all happily spoke of a party that the twins were planning on throwing that night. Too bad Harish never made it to the party.