Water, page 16
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
For that very reason. To-day she would say good-bye to childhood.
Carn flicked his tail, impatient.
“Oh, all right,” she said aloud.
She clipped herself into the harness, laid her body along his with her hip beside the big forefin, tapped her tail against his flank, and streamlined herself to the rush of water as he surged away.
Now she did smile. It was impossible not to. To Ailsa, as to all merfolk, riding a blue-fin who really wanted to go was the finest thing in the ocean. You didn’t need to be a child to feel like that.
They returned to the taffrail, he in dark armour that had clearly seen service, she in a long green cloak. By now the following ship was hull up, half again both their size and speed. A black flag strained at the mast-head. The captain, still watching, turned and frowned.
“My lady, you should be below.”
“Are you going to fight?”
“What else can we do? If we surrender, they will still slit our throats. A lucky shot may bring down her mast.”
“Then I will fight too. My lord has spare pistols. I know the use of them.”
Blue-fin have three main paces—drift, pulse and surge. Carn was still at full surge, delighted to be going somewhere, anywhere. Ailsa twitched the bit in his mouth.
“Easy,” she told him. “Easy. We’ve got all day.”
He responded as much to her voice as to the bit and slowed to a steady pulse, heading up to just below the wave-roots, where the going was still smooth, and the water golden with morning. Later, when they were beyond pursuit, they would practise some wave leaping. Carn was still young, Ailsa’s first blue-fin—as a child she had ridden the smaller yellow-fin. The waves today were just about right for schooling him, steady in their march, tall enough for him to get the point, but not so tall that he might lose confidence.
Merfolk have an innate sense of direction, and Ailsa knew where she was heading, south-southwest, out over the Grand Gulf, a vast empty tract with immeasurable depths below. Nobody had much business out this way, so it was here that she was least likely to be seen. She had kept the same course for almost an hour when she heard the thunder.
Thunder, on a day like this? And there was something odd about the sound. It had the right deep roll but came jarring through the water as if it had begun there, somewhere ahead and to the left, rather than spreading more vaguely down from the distant sky.
Again! And Carn had faltered in his rhythm, as he did when surprised. And again. Ailsa turned him towards the sound. No, not thunder—too short a rumble, and too regular. A boom, a pause. Another boom, and pause. Another. Now straight ahead. After several more booms she began to sense the distance, a few hundred lengths only. And from above the surface, not below.
Half consciously she had kept aware of the pattern of broad stripes, light and dark, that marked the sunlit and shadowed slopes of the waves above, running slantwise to her path. She headed Carn to cross them square, picked one wave and, watching it intently, pulled him into a climb and flicked him to full surge, aiming a fin and a half below the moving wave crest. In the last few strokes she lashed her own tail in rhythm with his to add to the speed of the outstrike.
The idea was to leave the wave as high as possible, so that your two bodies were well up into the burning air while the blue-fin’s tail still had water to drive against. Then you saw how many wave crests you could clear before the instrike. But the confusion of the moving wave roots through which you were aiming made it harder than it may sound, and this time Ailsa struck so low that they barely cleared the first crest. This was just as well, as it gave them a soft instrike, and she wasn’t ready for it. She’d been distracted by what she’d glimpsed across Carn’s shoulder at the top of the leap. Two great ships of the airfolk.
There were old wrecks littered around the mountain, but Ailsa had never seen floating ships before, except in books.
White smoke puffed from the bows of the pursuer. Thunder rolled across the water. The shot fell wide. They did not see the splash. On the after-deck of the fleeing ship, sailors waited beside two small cannon, four to each gun. Another boom, and a splash astern and to starboard.
“Why do you not fire back?” said the woman. “And why so many of you? Are you not needed to sail the ship?”
One of the sailors answered.
“We haven’t the range with these popguns, my lady. We’ll fire as soon as our shot will reach them. Our best hope is to dismast her, and for that we must handle our guns as well as we’re able—two of us to lay and haul back after the recoil, one to swab out and load, and one to carry powder.”
“My lord and I can at least carry powder. It will be better than waiting. Show us.”
As they reached the companionway, the first shot struck. They felt the small boat’s timbers jar with the impact, somewhere aft, low down.
They followed their guide on into the dark.
Ailsa put Carn onto a lead rope and floated herself up to a little behind the crest of a wave, with only the top half of her head clear of the water. When that wave carried her astern, she dived and repositioned herself. Carn circled impatiently below her, but dutifully kept the lead rope just slack.
It took her a while to see, and then to understand, what the two ships were doing. Her eyes were lensed and shaped for underwater vision, and too dazzled by sunlight to pick out any detail. At first all she could be sure of was the two tall ships, the leading one bright, the other larger and more grim. They were making the thunder, and with it sent out white stuff like clouds, which rolled away on the wind. Then she heard a crash and a cry and the smaller ship seemed to stagger for a moment in its course. Squinting beneath half-closed lids, she saw airfolk at the front of the larger ship working some sort of dark pipe from which the thunder and the smoke emerged. And yes, the airfolk at the back of the small ship were doing the same, making a thinner boom, with less of the cloudy stuff. Ailsa realised that the airfolk were using the pipes to throw things at each other, not darts or spears, which were the merfolk’s weapons, but dark balls which they crammed into the pipes between booms.
A heavier crash, and cries of many voices. The smaller ship staggered, swung sideways, wallowed. Part of the towering white fins that seemed to drive it were twisted away, falling, collapsing. The other ship came surging on with a mass of airfolk gathered at its front. Sunlight flashed off weapons. There was a louder crash, bellows, screams, fighting. She watched, amazed and distressed, until two figures appeared at the front of the stricken ship, one white and glittering like sunlit spray, the other dark and tall. The fight continued, with the attackers driving forward. Sharp whipping cracks rapped out amid the yells. The white figure—Ailsa, unthinking, had drifted herself near enough to see that it was a woman—turned her head, watched the fight for a moment, turned back and spoke.
“It is time to go,” she said softly.
She had let her green cloak fall and stood at the rail in the dress that had been stitched for her marriage, though not to this man. Ten thousand seed pearls patterned its surface, and on it she had pinned every jewel she had brought, and they were many, for she was a king’s daughter. The sun dazzled off her as if she had been white sea foam. On her cheek was a smoky burn, the back-flash from a pistol. The ship lurched and wallowed. The yells neared as the pirates started to force the companionway to the foredeck.
He flung his sword out to sea and with brisk fingers unbuckled his sword-belt. He grasped a stay, climbed, balanced on the heaving rail and helped her up to stand beside him. She laid her body against his, passed the belt around their waists and fastened it tight. The empty scabbard dangled by her side.
“I have brought you to this,” she said, putting her arms around his neck. “It was all my doing. You had the whole world before you.”
He bowed his head.
“My world is in your arms,” he said.
The pirates erupted onto the foredeck and rushed towards them, but he clasped her to him and leapt clear. They hit the water with a glittering splash, and at once the weight of his armour carried them under. Her dark hair streamed above them as they sank, mixed with the pearl-like bubbles of their breath.
Ailsa saw the sword arc through the air, dived and was already swimming towards it as it splashed into the downslope of the next wave. She lashed with her tail and caught it not three lengths under. When she rose, the white figure and the black were poised on the rail at the very edge of the ship. A man and a woman. Lovers. Their pose and gestures signalled love. With one hand the man gripped the rope that rose beside him and with the other steadied the woman while she bound some kind of strap around their waists. She put her arms round his neck and spoke. He bowed his head to hers and answered. Time stopped.
The waves stood still, the spume hung brilliant in the air, the wisps of cloud-stuff remaining from the fight hovered motionless, and Ailsa’s own heart paused between beat and beat. The lenses of her eyes seemed to adjust so that she could see every detail with diamond clarity.
And then they leapt, and the splash of their entry sparkled in the sunlight, while the pirates gathered with yells of anger to the rail and gazed down at the spreading circle of foam.
The moment held Ailsa in its trance. She had no need to try to understand what had happened. The moment was all that mattered, with its focussed brilliance and beauty, as if forces, whole lives, had been gathered into it from before-time and after-time, the way that light is gathered into a drop of spume or a jewel. They had made it so, in and for each other, choosing to leap, choosing to die. . . . Yes, die. Ailsa knew that airfolk could not live long in water, any more than she could in air.
The thought broke the trance. If she was quick, perhaps they did not have to die. She dived, twitching the lead rope as she lashed herself downward. Almost at once Carn was beside her, positioned so that she could grasp the hand-grip. Still swimming, she slid the sword under the centre-strap, laid her body against his and flicked him into full surge while she loose-rode him down.
But blue-fin, like merfolk, are creatures of the upper layers of ocean. The wild ones never enter the sunless underdeeps. The green-gold light changed through heavier green towards full dark in which they would see nothing at all. Carn tried to level out, and even with the leverage of the harness it was an effort to force him on down. She was fighting to hold course when she saw the lovers, right at the edge of her dwindling sphere of vision.
Their lips were on each other’s lips as the darkness took them.
“There!” she gasped. And Carn had seen them too, knew what he was here for, and drove on down. The water darkened. The woman’s dress was a shadowy glimmer, almost in reach. A layer of deadly chill slid over Ailsa. Such layers exist in all deep oceans, and the Grand Gulf was deep beyond knowledge. The merfolk call these layers limits, and do not willingly go beyond them.
Now Ailsa could see the lovers no more. She loosed one hand from the grip, reached, groped, touched something narrow and hard, clutched it. The sudden weight loosed her other hand from the grip. She swirled and lashed upward, dragging the weight with her. Terror sluiced through her.
It had happened in the instant of turning. Before, still diving, she had been afraid, of the dark, of the cold, of going too deep to return, ordinary flesh-and-blood fears. This, filling her body as she forced her way upward, was terror. It was as if the cold and the dark had made themselves into a thing, alive, but huge as the immense underdeeps, dark beyond black, cold beyond ice, something that had been waiting there for the lovers to fall into its ice and dark, but now, now that she was dragging them back . . . She had not let go only because the nightmare had locked the muscles of her grip like iron.
She did not notice passing through the limit. Something broke into her nightmare, a soft touch against her cheek, Carn’s querying snout. And it was no longer dark. Almost, but not quite. In wonder she looked up and saw that though she was still many lengths deep she could see far above her the ripple-pattern of the sunlit waves. She was exhausted, her heart thundering, her gills aching with the effort to sift the rush of water. There was a pain in her hand from the ferocity of her grip, and a fierce ache running up her arm from the wrenching weight she had dragged from below. She looked down and made out that she was holding the scabbard of a sword, still fastened to its belt, and the belt was buckled round the bodies of the two airfolk she had seen leap from the ship.
They wavered below her, a man and a woman, he in dark armour, she in a strange white covering which hid all but her head and her hands. (Merfolk wear armour if they need to but have no use for clothes.) This covering had glittered in the sun, and glinted now in the dimness, because it was sewn with innumerable seed pearls, among which were fastened many greater jewels. The faces were calm and pale, their eyes open but unseeing. The woman’s dark hair floated all around them.
I am too late, thought Ailsa. They are dead. But still it did not cross her mind to leave them to drift down into the cold and dark below, and the things of cold and dark that waited for them there.
Carn was fidgety, but Ailsa murmured to steady him while she made her arrangements. She slid the sword into the scabbard to get it out of the way, unclipped the lead rope and ran it through the shoulder strap of the man’s swordbelt, and then clipped it to the load hook so that Carn could take the weight. Now with both hands free she found the buckles on the man’s armour and undid them. The thigh-pieces came loose and fell, but the body armour was held fast by the sword belt. She tied the loose end of the lead rope round the woman’s chest, beneath the arms, and, supporting the man’s weight in the crook of her elbow, managed to undo the buckle. The body armour was hinged at the shoulders, like a clam shell, with a hole for the man’s neck. She eased the contraption over his head and let it fall. Below it she found that he too was wearing a covering, a soft brown stuff like cured sharkskin. She refastened his swordbelt round him, and retied the lead rope round his chest so that the two bodies, almost weightless now without the armour, floated side by side from the load hook. Finally she adjusted the harness as best she could to balance her own body against the trailing load, and clipped herself in. Before she flicked her tail to set Carn going, she cast a look down into the black deeps beneath her.
They were nearer than they had been. The limit itself was moving. She knew it, though she could feel no change in the water around her. The underdeeps—that whole immense mass of cold and dark—were rising towards her. Terror, nightmare, swept through her as before. Carn bolted.
He surged for the surface, for the warm and golden water beneath the wave roots. Once there, he levelled and surged on, still in a crazed panic beyond Ailsa’s control. His madness had the effect of blocking her own, by giving her something urgent to do. At first she tried to master him, to force his head round, to pierce through his panic with shouted commands. She reached and gripped the bit-ring and heaved with all her strength. She had heard her father’s huntmaster, Desmar, describe having done this with a bolting blue-fin, but Carn was too strong for her.
Then she realised that at least he was bolting for home. Her best hope was to let him have his way. But swimming at full surge all that distance, with the inert load of the airfolk trailing behind, he could injure himself beyond recovery. Last year a group of young nobles racing for wagers on half-trained stock had brought them home in such a state that her father, furious, had banished the riders to remote reefs. Two of the fish had had to be put down. She would not let that happen to Carn.
It still did not cross Ailsa’s mind to abandon the airfolk. She was sure that, having done what she had, she must now go through with it, and face whatever punishments she must. There was something about the woman, not only the covering and jewels that she wore, but the way that she had stood and moved, had held herself in the face of death, that spoke to Ailsa. She too was a king’s daughter.
With one hand she clasped the grip and with the other unclipped her harness and free-rode. Now she had to transfer herself across Carn’s body, round behind the big forefin. This was riding-school stuff, to be done at a steady pulse. She’d never tried it at full surge in the open sea. She shifted her left hand down to the centre-belt, which circled Carn’s body just in front of the forefin, let go of the grip and trailed at arm’s length. Now she changed hands on the belt and with her left arm reached round behind the fin and felt and found the belt again at the limit of her stretch. Arching her body so that the rush of water lifted her clear of Carn’s, she let a twist of her tail flip her across the spiny ridge that ran from forefin to afterfin, and she was there. She rested a moment, transferred her right hand to grip the load hook, and then with a straining effort used her left to haul on the doubled lead rope until she had enough slack to thumb the loop off the hook and let go. As soon as he was free of the dragging load, Carn surged away, out of sight.
After that it was a matter of working out the easiest way for her to tow the two bodies. She finished with the rope running over the back of her neck and the airfolk trailing, one on each side, leaving her arms free to balance the load against the thrust of her tail. When the rope began to chafe her neck, she stopped and unfastened the top half of the man’s covering. To her surprise he was wearing yet another layer of covering, a fine white stuff with delicate patterns at wrist and neck. She used the top covering to pad the rope where it chafed, and swam on.
As she toiled along, she brooded on the uncomfortable certainty that she must now face her father and explain not only that morning’s delinquency—she had known what she would say about that before she set out—but her dealings with the airfolk. By custom so strong that it was almost law, merfolk had nothing to do with airfolk. All tales of such meetings ended in grief. Why should this be any different? It was some while before she became aware of a quite different kind of unease, coming not from inside her but from somewhere outside. Somewhere below.
