Water, page 17
part #1 of Tales of Elemental Spirits Series
At first she told herself that it was a sort of aftershock, a leftover bit of the panic that had gripped her in the cold and dark below the limit. She tried to drive it away by returning to the problem of what she could say to her father. She was still quite sure that she had been right to do what she’d done, but how could she put her reasons into words? They were all to do with the moment at which the man and the woman had stood on the rail of the ship and by the force of their love for each other had made that moment into a lifetime. How could she make anyone else see that? To do so, they would need to see the moment.
Something tapped at her mind. The unease—the certainty of it made it more than unease—flooded back. She stared downwards, but saw nothing, felt nothing. She did not need to. Here too, she could tell, the limit had risen.
Again on the edge of panic, she forced herself to swim steadily on, but as she did so, she began more and more to feel that an immense slow wave of cold and darkness was following her across the ocean floor. If she changed course, so would the wave. Indeed, she felt it was deliberately telling her so. Just as it had tapped at her mind while she was remembering the lovers’ last moment of life, so now it was letting her know that it would follow her until she released them and let them sink through the dwindling light to where the cold and the dark waited for them.
She longed to rest but did not dare, knowing that the effort of swimming with the dragging load was all that was keeping panic at bay. By noon it was clear that she would not be home by nightfall. And then, well into the afternoon, she heard conch-calls, the thin, wavering wails that the huntsmen blew, keeping in touch along the line as they drove the game towards the waiting spear party. Like whalesong, the notes travelled far underwater. She heard one away to her left, and another nearer, another to her right, and a fourth yet further off, too widely spaced for a game drive. And no hunt was planned for today . . . but of course it was for her they were hunting. Carn had come home, spent and still in harness . . . someone must have seen the direction. . . . She headed for the nearest conch.
It turned out to be Scyto, a dour-seeming but kindly old merman who had helped break and train Carn. The moment he saw her, he blew a short call and drove his blue-fin towards her.
“My lady!” he said. “Where have you . . . what are these?”
Before she could speak, he blew the call again.
“Did Carn come home?” she said. “Is he all right?”
“He came, and maybe he’ll do. But these?”
“We must take them to my father,” she said, refusing to explain.
“If you say so, my lady,” he said, but clearly didn’t like it.
A conch sounded nearby. Scyto answered, and Aspar came surging up, saying the same things and asking the same questions.
“We are taking them to my father,” said Ailsa.
“Airfolk! Dead!” said Aspar.
“Do what you’re told, lad,” said Scyto. “Steady, there. Steady!”
This last to his blue-fin, which had shied as he was looping the lead rope onto the load hook. A moment later Aspar’s blue-fin shied violently and might have bolted if Aspar hadn’t forced its head round.
“What’s into the blue-fin?” he muttered.
“Dunno,” said Scyto. “You take the princess. Let’s go.”
Ailsa gripped the load hook and laid herself along the flank of the big blue-fin. Aspar flicked his tail and they pulsed away. Two more huntsmen curved in to join them, blowing their conches, and then others, so that they schooled along together, calling continuously that the hunt was over. It was a sound Ailsa could remember from her earliest years. She had always liked the huntsmen, and they had seemed to like her. Things seemed almost normal once more, so that for a while she lost the nightmare sense of being tracked from below by something huge and cold and dark, and began to worry again about how she could face her father. Then she noticed the huntsman to her left lean out and peer down, and another beyond him doing the same. The calls faltered and the Huntmaster, Desmar, riding lead, raised a hand to signal a halt.
“Anyone notice?” he said.
“Way down?” asked several voices.
“Blue-fin are twitchy as hell,” said someone.
They hovered, craning to see what lay below, but there was only shapeless dark.
“Airfolk,” grumbled someone. None of them would look towards the drowned lovers dangling at the rope’s ends. Huntsmen were always superstitious. Their task depended so much on the luck of the ocean. Left to themselves they would have untied the rope and let the airfolk fall.
“We must take them to my father,” said Ailsa.
“Right then,” said Desmar. “Let’s get on with it.”
The king rode out to meet them above the slopes of the mountain. Relays of conch-calls had told him that his daughter was found. His green skin was flushed dark with anger, but he remained, as always, firmly calm. In silence he accepted Ailsa’s formal salute, palms together, head bowed, tail curled under. In silence he glanced at the airfolk, turned his head and gestured. Master Nostocal, the court physician, bowed and drifted across to inspect them. Ailsa guessed that old Nosy must have come out with her father in case something had happened to her.
The king drifted aside with Desmar and spoke with him, staring down the mountain. He beckoned to two of the huntsmen. They saluted, listened to their orders and rode their blue-fin downward. At last he beckoned to Ailsa.
“You cut school,” he said. “I had thought you were past that, but we will talk about it later. What then?”
She told her story as clearly as she could. He listened without interruption to her account of the fight and her dive to reach the airfolk. At that point he stopped her.
“You crossed the limit? You were not afraid?”
“There wasn’t time. I had to reach them. But then, as soon as I turned back . . . It was worse than nightmares. . . .”
“Something specific had made you afraid?”
“Yes. I don’t know what. When it happened, I just panicked, I didn’t know why. But I got away, above the limit, and it was better there. But then whatever it was started to follow us up. That’s why Carn bolted. I had to let him go. It wasn’t his . . .”
“Yes. This thing. You didn’t see it? Feel something in the water?”
“Not like that. I can’t explain. But it’s been following me . . . us . . . them . . . And the huntsmen felt it too. And all the blue-fin.”
He floated silent, withdrawn. The dark green of his anger was gone, but that did not mean that her delinquency was forgotten. He would return to it in due time.
“You could have let them fall,” he said.
“No. I mean, not once I’d followed them down and brought them back up . . . it wouldn’t have been right. You can see she’s a king’s daughter . . . I think . . .”
Even that certainty, so obvious while she had watched the lovers at the rail, was now blurred. What did she know of the kings of the airfolk?
Her father nodded and glanced enquiringly beyond her. Ailsa turned and saw Master Nostocal hovering there with an excited expression on his lined old face. He saluted and, barely waiting for permission to speak, blurted out, “The airfolk are still alive, my lord!”
“Alive? Airfolk die in water. Is this not known?”
“Hitherto, my lord, but these. . . . I have felt their pulses, firm, but slow beyond belief—eighteen of mine to one of theirs. They live, my lord.”
“No doubt at all?”
“None, my lord.”
“Then I cannot decide their fate alone. We must take them home and hold council. Ailsa, you will go straight to your rooms and stay there, not speaking to anyone of any of this, until I send for you.”
Ailsa made the salutation and backed away. She could see Aspar waiting by his blue-fin, but chose a course that took her past the lovers. She slowed and gazed down at them. Even the unbelievable knowledge that they were still alive seemed vague to her as she saw once more in her mind the poised instant before they had leapt from the ship. The memory seemed still as vivid as the event itself, when she had watched it from the wave-top. But now it faded and something seemed to form where it had been, a cold, dark, numbing question.
“The king is mounted, my lady,” said Aspar’s voice. From his tone Ailsa could hear that he had said it more than once. Dazedly she let him clip her into his harness and then he free-rode the blue-fin home.
They dreamed slow dreams of dark and cold.
Home was an immense undersea mountain, an extinct volcano riddled with tunnels and caves and underground chambers which the merfolk over many generations had shaped and enlarged to their uses. The palace was only a small part of the complex, running a hundred lengths or so along the southern slope of the mountain, above the solid, unchambered spur along which Ailsa had slipped out that morning to find Carn. Now she waited at her window, looking out over this view, and thus it was that she saw the return of the two huntsmen who had ridden down the slope at her father’s command. They rode a single blue-fin, which the one who held the reins struggled to control as it surged towards the main gate and out of sight.
Food was brought, not the punishment fare that used to follow her old escapades, but clam strips on a bed of sweet-weed, ripe sea-pears and manatee cheese. She ate and tried to read, but mostly she watched from the window as the Councillors gathered. Time passed. Twice more, unwilled, the scene she had witnessed that morning formed in her mind, and each time it was followed by the same chill question. The light on the wave-roof changed from gold to pink to purple, and when it was almost dark, a chamberlain came with a phosphor lamp and said it was the king’s wish that the Princess Ailsa should attend him. This seemed strangely formal, and when she moved, expecting him to lead the way, he coughed and said, “His Majesty is in Council, my lady.”
Startled, she fetched her diadem from its case and threaded its horns into her hair. Checking in the mirror, she decided that she looked silly wearing only the single large sapphire and an everyday necklace, so she added the white-gold carcanet with the rubies that had been her naming present from her grandmother, and the pearl and sapphire pendant and tail-bracelet that had been her mother’s favourite jewels. The chamberlain nodded approval and led her first along the familiar passageways of the domestic quarters, and on down through grander windings to the Council Chamber.
Attendants waited. Doors were flung wide. Conches sounded. A voice cried, “Her Royal Highness the Princess Ailsa attends His Majesty in Council.”
The chamber blazed with phosphor. Ailsa paused at the entrance to salute the king, finned herself gently down the aisle between the Councillors, and saluted again. Merfolk are weightless in water, so have no need for chairs. Instead of a throne, the king’s office and authority were marked by a crystal pillar on which he rested the hand that held his sceptre. There was a smaller pillar to his left. At his feet lay the bodies of the airfolk. Somebody had combed the man’s hair and beard and fastened his sword belt round him. The woman’s white covering had been straightened and her marvellous long dark hair, which otherwise would have floated all around her, had been tidied into smooth waves and fastened with oyster-shell combs.
The king beckoned Ailsa forward and gestured to the smaller pillar. Nobody, she knew, had used it since her mother died. She turned, rested her right hand on it and waited while the Councillors murmured their greetings.
“My daughter will tell you what she did and saw,” said the king.
Ailsa began with her ride out over the Grand Gulf, saying nothing about why she had chosen to go there. That was for her father alone. Otherwise she described all that had happened, including her own sensations, the detailed intensity of the moment when the lovers had made their choice to die, and the sudden mastering panic that had overwhelmed her when she had turned back from beyond the limit. She told the story collectedly, without any of the confusion and doubt she had felt when she had told it to her father. It did not take long.
“Thank you,” said the king. “Are there further questions for the princess? No? Well, that is most of what we know. There was a fight between two ships of the airfolk. This pair leapt into the sea to escape their attackers. The princess dived, hoping to rescue them, and crossed the limit. She did that, she tells me, with no special fear in the urgency of action—no more, at least, than any of us might feel—but on turning back with the airfolk, she was overcome by inexplicable terror, a sense that something very large and cold and strange . . .”
He paused. Perhaps Ailsa alone in the Council Chamber knew why. She too had felt the crystal pillar tremble beneath her hand. Cushioned by the water in which they floated, the others might well not have sensed the shock. The pillars were based on solid rock, so it was the mountain itself that must have trembled.
“. . . large and cold and strange lay below her. This is not a young woman’s fancy. She recovered herself and hitched the airfolk to her blue-fin to tow them home, but before long the blue-fin, a steady, reliable animal, bolted. The princess let him go and continued to tow the airfolk unaided. As she did so, she became convinced that whatever she had sensed beyond the limit was now following her. Again this is not mere fancy. The huntsmen who met her reported the same impression. Their own blue-fin, too, were barely controllable. When this was reported to me, I asked two of them to scout down the mountain but not to cross the limit. As they approached the limit, one of their blue-fin threw its rider and bolted, and but for good ridership the other would have done the same. As you are aware, the limit rises and falls a little with the seasons, but one of the men, who has often been down the mountain, reports that it is now many lengths higher than he has ever known it. Finally Master Nostocal, who has long had an interest in the anatomy of airfolk and has studied many bodies, found when he came to inspect these two that they still live, though in some kind of suspended animation. This is without precedent both in his own experience and in the books he has consulted since his return. Has anyone anything further to add? Councillor Hormos?”
Nobody knows how the merfolk came into being, though there are legends that say that at some point far in the past the strains of airfolk and fish came somehow to be mingled, and thus the first merfolk were born. Because of this hybrid inheritance they vary greatly in appearance, though most, like Ailsa, have a single tail, internal gills, and an upper body much like that of the airfolk. Ailsa’s fingers were half-webbed, and she had a pair of silky waving fins running from her elbows to her shoulders, and another running almost the whole length of her spine. But double tails are not uncommon, especially in the northern oceans, and in one almost landlocked sea there is a race that has legs like airfolk and can breathe a long while in the air. There are even legends of merfolk who have been born on dry land, and have not for years realised their true nature.
At the other end of the range, and also rare, are merfolk who are almost wholly fish. It might be guessed that these would be despised, as being so near to an inferior sort of creature, but though merfolk hunt and eat and use the sea beasts, they also respect them, knowing that they themselves are in a sense interlopers. They therefore value members of their own race who most closely resemble fish, believing rightly that these have a truer understanding of the many mysteries of the sea.
Councillor Hormos was such a one, an undoubted merwoman, but with a large, solid, grouper-like shape, apart from human ears, in which she wore elaborate earrings. She floated vertically from her place, saluted the king with a movement of her tail, and spoke in a quick, breathy twitter that went oddly with her appearance.
“I believe,” she said, “that Her Royal Highness has had the misfortune to disturb the Kraken.”
The Council muttered surprise. The king nodded for her to continue.
“You will remember nursery stories about the Kraken,” she said. “The unbelievably huge creature that will at the end of time arise from the sea floor and destroy the world. Your reasons have told you that there can be no such life form, and who knows the doom of the world? But there are fish that live far below the limit, fish whose ancestors in remote time made their way down into those lightless depths, and when they did so found that there was something already there, not of the same creation as sea-things and air-things, something whose nature is pure cold, pure dark, something utterly other. That is what fish know, in their small-brained way. They cannot put the knowledge into pictures or words, but it is still there, in their blood. It is in your blood too, and mine, and perhaps we can dimly sense it. Perhaps it is from this faint memory that we have constructed the nursery tale of the Kraken. And it is perhaps through that remnant of knowledge in her blood that the princess, and the huntsmen too, sensed the movement of something vast and strange in the deeps below them.”
“Others, myself among them, have crossed the limit and returned,” said the king. “We did not wake this creature. Why should the princess have done so?”
“She has told us she feels it was waiting for these airfolk to fall into its realm,” said Hormos. “But she took them away, and now it is seeking for them. As I said, I would trust her feeling. It comes from the knowledge in her blood.”
Another Councillor caught the king’s eye, received his nod and rose.
“Could this thing actually destroy the world?” he asked.
The Royal Archivist sought permission and rose.
“Does anyone remember Yellowreef?” he wheezed. “It’s a legend, of course, but some authorities believe there’s history behind it. It was in West Ocean, a mountain city much like ours. The people there found a lode of emeralds, far down, near the limit, and mined them. They went down and down, making themselves a sort of armour to endure the pressure and the cold, until something came from even deeper and took the mountain in its grip and shook it so that it crumbled apart and the merfolk could live there no more.”
Nobody spoke. In the silence Ailsa felt the crystal pillar shudder again beneath her palm. She caught her father’s eye and knew that he had felt the same. She raised her hand for permission to speak. He nodded. She rose.
