Water, page 18
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
“Yes, we must take them back,” she said. “Or it will shake the mountain to pieces like it did Yellowreef.”
“But they still live,” said the king. “They are very different from us, but they are people nonetheless, and under the protection of our laws. I could not send any of our own people to such a death without their consent.”
“They’ve chosen already,” said Ailsa. “I saw them do it. And it’s the Kraken who’s keeping them alive. It’s got to be. It wants them alive. Perhaps it can’t keep them alive for ever.”
“Very well,” said the king. “The Council must decide. Before we vote, I will tell you that while I have been here I have twice felt this pillar shake beneath my hand, and I think my daughter has felt the same. I have never known it do so before. Now it seems to me that we have only two choices. We cannot simply keep them here. If they wake, they will die. So either we can take them back to where my daughter saw them sink, or we can tow them to some shore and strand them in air, to live or die as their own fate falls. Will those in favour of the former course please rise?”
It was close. By only four votes the Council decided to take the lovers back to where the Kraken, perhaps, waited for them.
Their dreams were darker, colder, slower yet. There was death at the edge of them.
They did the lovers full honour, schooling out as if for a royal funeral, the whole court, formally jewelled, to the sound of sad music. By now few of the merfolk had any doubt that they were doing what they must. Three times in the night the mountain had shaken so that all had felt it. Scouts reported that the limit had risen yet further up the slopes.
Ailsa rode near the front, knowing where she had gone yesterday. Carn was still too spent for work, so she had an elderly quiet blue-fin from the royal stables. The lovers lay on sleds weighted with boulders and buoyed with bladders so that they would not sink until they were needed to. Master Nostocal rode beside them, and took their pulses at intervals. He had reported that morning that their heartbeats were slower and weaker than before, and was afraid that whatever was keeping them alive was losing its ability to do so.
For a while, with so many people around her, Ailsa was not sure that she could sense the same immense mass of cold and dark that she had felt yesterday, tracking her across the sea bed. But even her stolid old animal was nervous, and the huntsmen riding scout on the flanks said they thought it was there. Slowly she began to feel more sure, and she knew for certain when the great tide below came to a halt.
“This is the place,” she said.
They did not doubt her. They could tell, too.
The music changed. The merfolk gathered round the sleds and held them in position while the air was released from the bladders. Ailsa, full of grief at what she accepted must be done, was watching the stream of silvery bubbles shoot towards the wave-roof when a cold, dark thought slid into her mind. Not, this time, a question. A command.
“It wants me too,” she said.
“No,” said the king.
“I must go with them, or it will break the mountain.”
“No, I will go,” cried someone. Others joined, until the king raised his hand for silence.
“It’s got to be me,” said Ailsa.
He stared at her, and away, and bowed his head.
“Hold the sleds there,” he said, and took her to one side.
“You are certain of this?” he said.
“Yes. It told me. As if it had spoken.”
“Will you come back?”
“It didn’t say.”
Hard lines creased his face. This was how he had looked at her mother’s funeral.
“Very well,” he said.
She raised her hands to remove her diadem. To do the lovers honour, she had put on the same jewels as the night before, but there was no point in taking them with her. If she did not come back, her cousin Porphyry would become Prince. He should have them, for his wife when he married.
“No, wear them,” said her father. “You must go as what you are, a king’s daughter.”
They went back to where the sleds were waiting. Ailsa took the middle of the rope that joined them, raised her forehead for her father’s kiss, and nodded. The merfolk loosed their hold and the weight of the boulders carried her down. The light faded, more slowly than when Carn had dived at full surge. Ailsa was only vaguely afraid. The terror she should have felt was somehow numbed, like a pain being kept at bay by one of Master Nostocal’s drugs. She could not guess what the Kraken wanted with her. Perhaps it would keep her in some strange half death, like that of the lovers, in its kingdom of dark and cold. The massive pressure of water closed around her. Light died. It became dark as night, dark as a starless midnight, darker than any night. With a plunge of cold she felt the limit pass.
Beyond it waited the Kraken.
Ailsa was aware of it in her mind, not through her bodily senses. In her mind she could feel the immeasurable length of it on either side of her, its immeasurable depth below, dark beyond black, cold beyond ice. It told her to let go of the rope. In her mind she saw the tendrils of dark that wreathed from it and took the lovers, playing over their bodies. But now there was light, light seen with her eyes, a dazzling spark as one of the tendrils lifted a jewel from the woman’s dress. The light blazed from the jewel as the tendril turned it this way and that, and then vanished as the Kraken took it into itself.
Other jewels blazed or sparkled or glowed in turn, and were lost. The seed pearls on the woman’s covering woke into an iridescent design which then flowed away, rippling like some luminous sea-thing, into the Kraken’s inward blackness. When they were gone, Ailsa was once more in total dark.
Now in her mind she saw the Kraken moving its tendrils to inspect the lovers. Despite the weight on the sled they had fallen no farther. Light glowed again, but this time she was unsure whether she was seeing it through her eyes or in her mind, faint streaking glimmers moving to and fro across and through the immense dark mass—dots of light, she thought, but moving so fast that they seemed to be glowing lines. She had no idea what this meant.
When the Kraken had done with the lovers, it briefly considered the sleds on which they lay, then turned its attention to Ailsa. Sensing the movement of the black tendrils towards her, she raised her hands, removed her diadem and offered it to them. As they touched it, the sapphire shone with a pure, pale light, more brilliant, more truly a jewel, than she had ever known it. Always before it had merely refracted the light that fell on it, tingeing that light with its colour. Now it was as if the Kraken was summoning out of it the sapphire’s inner light, and drawing that light into its own blackness, just as cold calls heat into it but heat cannot call cold.
When the blue blaze of the sapphire was gone, she offered one by one her carcanet, pendant, earrings and tail bracelet and watched them sparkle or flame at the Kraken’s touch. There was one small diamond in the carcanet that Ailsa had never particularly noticed as being different from any of the others which now shone out with the brilliance of Orion. When the Kraken had done with each piece, it took it into itself. Then it turned its attention to her.
The tendrils were soft, more feathery than the finest sea fern. She could scarcely feel their touch as they explored her shape, lingering a little at the waist where the smooth skin ended and the scales began. She saw again the strange darting lights, fewer than there had been with the lovers. When they had explored her tailfin, the tendrils moved up her body and gathered at the back of her head. Three times yesterday she had been asked the same dark question, but had not understood. Now she did.
The Kraken was not much interested in her. She was an oddity, with her airfolk torso and fish tail, but the ocean teems with oddities and the Kraken knew as much about them as it wished to. No, what absorbed it, what had caused it to move its vast mass across the ocean floor and shake the mountain in its anger, was the lovers. What could Ailsa tell it about them?
This time she did not need to put her story into words, which meant that she could tell it all, exactly as it had been. She felt that she could show, did in fact show the Kraken every sunlit droplet that had whipped from the wave-tops and every wisp of cloud-stuff that had puffed from the black tubes as the fight went on. She created again the arc of the sword through the air, created the precise poise, serene, passionate, unrepeatable, in which the lovers had balanced on the rail while the struggle had raged beyond them and the woman had buckled the sword belt round them so that they should go down unseparated into darkness. She created the final splash, and the attackers crowding to the rail.
At this point the Kraken seemed to lose interest. While Ailsa had been creating the moment, its whole mass had glimmered with a network of the streaking lines, but now these mostly died. At the same time her own mind went dull. If she had gone on to tell it, about her dive to reach the lovers, she would have had to do so with ordinary, fuzzy, gappy memory. The brilliance of full recall was gone. That was something that the Kraken had summoned from her, much as it had summoned the inner light from her jewels. As the tendrils withdrew from the back of her head, she felt a vague sense of loss. It crossed her mind that the Kraken would now take her into itself too. She was too numb, too exhausted, to be frightened by the idea.
As she waited for whatever would happen next, she became aware of the cold, and the pressure. Even merfolk, used to the chill and weight of water, cannot survive long at such depths. Soon, she thought dully, I shall be dead. I’m sorry for father—first mother, now me.
A brief command came into her mind. She held out both hands and the Kraken placed something in each. She recognised the feel of the rope in her right palm, but not the hard, small, sharp-cornered thing around which her left hand closed.
Another command said Go, so she lashed with her tail and rose, hauling the sleds behind her. They came so easily that she supposed that the Kraken had loosed all the ropes and sent her back with the sleds empty, but when light began to glimmer round her and she could look back, she saw that the lovers’ bodies were still there. The woman’s hair was floating loose, so the Kraken had taken even the little mother-of-pearl combs that had held it in place.
Then the scouts, patrolling the edge of darkness, found her. Conches called, and the blue-fin came surging down, driven so hard that the cavity bubbles streamed in their wake. Hands took the rope from hers, her father grasped her in one arm and wheeled his blue-fin and surged with her up into the warm and golden waters where she belonged. From there the funeral party rode hallooing home, and the mountain emptied to greet them.
They dreamed of green shadowy light, of wave-lap, of half-heard voices. Their heartbeats quickened.
Ailsa gazed at the dark jewel, the Kraken’s gift. It was more than black, beyond black. It was beyond cold—that is to say that it did not feel chill to the touch, but this wasn’t because it was at the same temperature as the touching hand. Instead, contact made the hand aware of the soft warmth of living flesh, its own warmth. So with light. The jewel was faceted and polished like one of Ailsa’s jewels, but no light shone back from any of its surfaces. Instead it sucked light into itself, calling it out of other things. If she took an emerald and placed it beside the black jewel, the emerald, which before had merely refracted the light from the phosphorescent corals that roofed the room, now blazed intensely green, blazed as a star does with its own generated light.
Looking at the black jewel, Ailsa knew that it was as close as she would ever come to understanding the Kraken’s world, that world in which cold and darkness were life, and heat and light were what Councillor Hormos had called “utterly other.”
“I’m sorry about Mother’s jewels,” she said.
“They’re nothing. I thought I had given my daughter to try to save the mountain.”
They were in one of his private rooms, where they had supped together, something that she had never done alone with him before. The walls and floor were strewn with treasures. (Since merfolk do not walk, floors are as good a place as walls for pretty things.) All of them, jewels and coral and gold and mother-of-pearl and amber, seemed alive in the black jewel’s presence, sending out their different lights in answer to its call.
And not only the jewels. Ailsa picked up the Kraken’s gift and cradled it in her palm. Though it was no broader than the base of her middle finger, she could see that inside it the darkness went on for ever. Now she herself felt the same summoning call, and she answered. Answered willingly. Let something—the thing that made her Ailsa and no one else—be drawn into that darkness, let it close around her.
Yes, it went on for ever, before, behind, above, below. There was nothing else, anywhere. But it wasn’t frightening. It had shape, structure, life, meaning, not in any ways she could understand—it was too other. But she was sure they were there.
A thread of understanding wound itself into her mind. Or perhaps it was in the Kraken’s mind, and she was there too, because the thread seemed to glimmer in the darkness like the thoughts she had seen racing to and fro across the Kraken’s huge mass in the darkness beyond the limit. Once again she heard the voiceless command, Go.
She withdrew, and the darkness released her.
She was floating in her father’ private room, staring at the Kraken’s gift, while that luminous thread found its place and meaning in her mind.
“I don’t think it was me the Kraken wanted,” she said slowly. “It wasn’t the airfolk either, really. Not for themselves, I mean. It was the moment. Just before they jumped. It was . . . I don’t know. . . . They were going to die, so they took their whole lives, everything before and after, and pressed all of it into that one moment together. I saw it. I felt it. I shan’t ever forget it. And the Kraken, all that way below . . . even right down there, the Kraken felt it too, and wanted it . . .
“I suppose it’s a bit like the jewels. Jewels are about light, aren’t they? It’s what they do with light that makes them what they are. And that’s why it wanted the moment—everything it could have of it—the airfolk—what I’d seen—to tell it about life. Our kind of life, merfolk and airfolk.”
“Why should it want these things? And what gives it the right to destroy our mountain for a whim, because it has been prevented from adding some bright little object to its collection?”
“I don’t think it’s like that. Whims, I mean. I think it needed the moment. It had been waiting for something like that since . . . since . . .
“It’s because we belong in the light, us and the airfolk. And that moment . . . it was so full of light—I’ll never see anything like it again all my life. Not just sunlight and glitter . . . it was them, the way they loved each other . . . everything shone with it. . . . That’s what the Kraken wanted . . . needed . . .
“The Kraken isn’t going to die, you know. But when the sun goes cold and there’s no light left, it will have the whole world, not just the bottom of the sea. But the moment will still be there, with all the other things it’s collected ever since time began, waiting to be born again when light comes back. That’s why it needs them. . . . Yes, because it’s our . . . our dark guardian . . .
“And I don’t think it gave me this . . .”
She touched the black jewel.
“. . . just to say thank you, just to be nice to me. It gave it to me because it thought we needed it. So that we can begin to understand its darkness. How other it is.”
“You keep using that word. You don’t just mean that it’s very different from us?”
“No, that isn’t the point. It’s more than different. It’s opposite.”
“Well, I suppose you could say we need some inkling of our opposite in order to understand ourselves.”
No, she thought. It was so much more than that, but he couldn’t imagine it. How could he? Anyway, it didn’t matter. She put the jewel down, and he nodded, closing the subject.
“Now,” he said. “I want you to explain why you cut school yesterday.”
“Because it was my last chance. From now on I’m not going to be able to do that sort of thing anymore. I’ll have to do whatever I’m supposed to do because I’m your daughter. I won’t be able to cut things. Nobody can make me do them, not even you. But I’ll make myself.”
“Dominie Paracan was hurt by your absence on your last day. It must have seemed like a deliberate slap in the face to him.”
“Yes.”
“You mean it was indeed deliberate.”
“Dominie Paracan has never treated me fairly.”
“He was instructed to deal with you rather more strictly than his other pupils.”
“I guessed that. But it was never just strictly. I was always being punished for things I didn’t deserve. He enjoyed setting traps for me in order to punish me. That’s why I used to play truant. If I was going to be punished, I might as well deserve it.”
He sighed. Ailsa had noticed that now, when he was alone with her, he didn’t feel the need to keep his usual mask of calm in place.
“That is the trouble with power,” he said. “It is the opposite of this jewel. It brings out the dark in you. Why didn’t you tell me when he sent you to me for punishment?”
“How could I come whining to you? I don’t want you to anything about it now, either. It’s over, and he’s a good teacher.”
He nodded, approving. She caught his sidelong glance of amusement.
“Well, since you have not come whining to me now,” he said, “I suppose I must deal this last time with your disobedience.”
“A week confined to my rooms on punishment fare?”
He laughed.
“As last time?” he said. “That will start to-morrow morning, but you will have to leave your rooms to report on to-day’s events to the Council. The Council will then declare a public holiday, as part of which I will remit a week’s punishment for all offenders. This will happen to include you. To-morrow afternoon we will hunt, and I’m afraid that will be the extent of your holidays, because from now on you had better take your place at the Council, and sit in on as many committees as you can so that you can learn their work. I must warn you that most of our meetings are a lot more boring than the one you attended yesterday.
