The Waters Rising (66 page)

She thought she nodded. Perhaps she nodded.

The tentacle tugged again. “Swim. See.”

He went ahead of her, huge but buoyant, tentacles trailing, she a tiny copy of him, propelling herself through the waters, a balloon with fringes trailing behind. She caught a tentacle tip around an arm of coral and spun to rest, eyes fastened upon the complexity and glory of the reef, jeweled with thousands of brightly colored fishes, ornamented with corals of myriad shapes, dotted with fringe-shelled clams, swarming with eels, starfish, urchins. A tiny octopus crept from a hole in the reef, its little tentacles like a fringed skirt. It greeted her as a child might greet her on the street. “H’lo. Who’re you?” She introduced herself. The baby giggled and withdrew into its hiding place.

“One of my offspring,” said the Sea King with a certain satisfaction. “The females of our new race come here for sperm packets and sometimes leave their egg packets close by.”

“Sperm . . . ?” Xulai felt herself flushing.

“Our males who have language do it no differently than we cephalopods have always done. Our males have always given a sperm packet to the females.” He chuckled. “Your people call this an ‘arm’s-length transaction.’ We find it sensible. Intelligent! You already know what we think of your way! All that . . .”

“Yes,” said Xulai, not wanting to get into
all that
. “I know.”

He continued. “Our females store the sperm, sometimes for a season or more. They use it when they have eggs ready, when they have found a safe place to attach them to the seafloor where the young will not be threatened. Of course, as Sea King, I have issued an edict concerning our young. Each creature with a mind knows they are not to touch them. The scientists have given us what they call disincentives. Our babies do not taste good.”

Xulai turned toward him and met the eyes of a dolphin, head and body tilted in the water so it could see her better.

It warbled, in Tingawan, “Is this your drylander daughter, Sea King?”

“It is,” he rumbled.

“Swim well and swiftly, sea daughter,” said the dolphin. “I will tell my people.”

“He speaks our language,” she murmured, watching it swim away. There was something strangely fringed about the flippers. Were those fingers at the edges?

“Those of us Sea People who speak, speak a language we have chosen to speak. We have our own languages as well, but we chose a simplified Tingawan to become the language of the sea. Dryland Tingawan has many more words than are strictly necessary. We are not writing a thesis here. We seek only to communicate!”

Across the bulk of him she saw something very strange. It looked like, it seemed to be . . . “What is that?” she asked, pointing with several tentacles.

He laughed, that deep, interior gurgle. “That is the dolphin’s joke. They said, because I am a king, I must have a castle. The corals grew it for them. Corals don’t talk; I don’t know how the dolphins told the corals what to do, but they grew me a castle! The dolphins had seen castles, here and there, where men live near the coast. When they had built it, the eels liked it very much, so they moved in. So, the Sea King has a castle full of eels.”

It was true; the place crawled with them. It actually seemed that one huge eel went up the entire height of the structure, and she had to stare for a moment to realize it was actually a tail at the bottom, several middles of eels at various places in between, and one quite large head at the top.

“I suppose everyone in the sea knows about it,” she said. “Your castle?”

“I suppose,” he said.

“There are people, refugees,” she said. “They say they are refugees from you, Sea King. They live on the great cliff of the highlands of Ghastain. Each of them wears an earring, a tower with what I thought was a snake winding through it.”

“I know. If you look very closely at what they wear, there is a little line of waves at the very top, hardly visible. That tells you the crest is an underwater tower with an eel wound through it. Those people are not refugees from me, Daughter. They take refuge from the sea. Their islands have been drowned, but I did not drown them. They are partly Tingawan, but the islanders have a different culture, a different language. We, Clan Do-Lok and I, asked them to settle there, to be an army, if we ever need an army. Some of our best geneticists are among them. They keep us informed of what is happening. They send messages to Wellsport and the dolphins bring them to Tingawa. They tell us who goes where. We offered them sea eggs in exchange for their help.”

“But there were no sea eggs then.”

“They know that. They live in hope, as we do. The Duchess of Altamont amuses—that is, amused herself with them, or they with her. They have sent messages to tell us she is dead, her mother the queen is dead. King Gahls is alone now. He is not an intelligent man. He will go on having parades while the water rises.”

“Gahls is not alone enough,” she replied. “Rancitor is Mirami’s son. He has evil blood. I’m sure the Tingawans know that. He must not become king.”

He shrugged enormously. “Forget it for a time. For this little time, simply enjoy the sea.”

He went to the castle and she turned aside to admire a marvelous fish. When she turned back, the Sea King had disappeared.

He did not reappear. Disoriented, she turned, turned again, finally called out. “Sea King!” She was looking at the last place she had seen him. And he emerged, there, from the background, laughing at her.

“How did you do that?”

“How did you do it? When you became a little child?”

“Precious Wind told you! I never knew how I did it.”

“You took the color of the thing you wished to be, the color of the background.”

“I was wearing clothes!”

“When you change, you are like water. You can leak through your clothes, tiny bits of you, like needles, holding the color of your background. I cannot do that, but then, I don’t have to.”

“You planned that!”

He laughed. “It was totally unforeseen. Precious Wind said you had done it. It took us a long, long time to figure out how.”

Precious Wind knew about it. Well, let it be; she did not really believe it. It had surprised her at the time, but it had felt much more like a mental thing to her, something she did with her mind, not her body.

Together they explored the coral-flowered, fish-gemmed castle, from its laughably porous dungeons at the bottom to its towers just below the water’s surface, one of which held a flagpole that waved a tiny red seaweed pennant. It was tenanted by great numbers of the Sea King’s children, safe from the eels because they did not taste good. After a time—short or long, she didn’t know—he reached out a tentacle and together they moved back toward the beach. Once there he thrust her toward the sand and moved away. “Change back.” It was only a whisper, but it was a command.

And she did, as she crawled onto the sand. Her head had not split, it had merely become flexible. Bits of skull joined together. Starting at the neck, her body came together and buttoned itself up like a long shirt and pair of trousers, though her real shirt and trousers lay on the sand where she had slipped out of them on her way into the ocean. All the little bits of bone slipped together like the oddly shaped pieces of those sawn puzzles Bear had made for her when she was little, locking together, knitting into solidity. The little subordinate brains up and down the tentacles encapsulated and hid themselves. Her flesh melded. She looked for a seam on her arm and could not find one.

Justinian and Lok-i-xan had turned and walked away when she came from the sea, whether from politeness or some less pleasant feeling, so only Abasio, still rigid as stone, widened his eyes as he saw her dress herself. Her eyes passed over him blindly, as though he were not there. He shivered. Apparently he didn’t exist; she had forgotten the entire world in which he existed.

When she turned toward the sea once again, the Sea King had moved a good way offshore. “Come to the edge of the sea and call my name if you need me,” he said.

“What is your name?”

“Just say you want to talk to your father,” he called, disappearing below the surface of the sea. “Or call for the Sea King.”

“Your father?” Abasio breathed from close behind her. He had had to force himself to approach, even though most of his fear had vanished when she had become Xulai once more. He put aside any contemplation of how he would feel about, how he would deal with, whatever other form she might choose or keep in the future. Let it alone. Don’t think of it. Deal with it, if at all, later on.

Xulai sighed, aware of him. This was Abasio. Yes. Abasio. He was there, steady, calm . . . like her other half. Had he been afraid? She could hear his heart beating, too quickly. He had been afraid. For her, or for himself? For both of them, probably. Of course he had. So had she. She reached behind her to take his hand. She leaned against him.

“All my fathers, Abasio, just think of all my fathers. Justinian is my father. Clan Do-Lok is my father. The Sea King is my father. I probably have a dozen mothers. Generations of them. Hundreds of years of them. Are you frightened, Abasio? I am quite definitely terrified, but I’m so stunned, I can’t feel it yet. I’m afraid I’ll be afraid, dreadfully afraid, when I do.”

He made a shivering sound, a fragile, brittle exclamation that was not quite laughter and not quite a shriek of terror. He made himself put his arms around her and draw her even closer. “Yes, I was . . . am frightened.”

“Do you know why?”

He could not answer immediately. At last he took a deep breath and said, “I decided it was because I thought you might not come back at all, or that you might come back as something else entirely. Which is what you may have done.”

She thought about it. “I worried about that, too, but no. I’m me. I was me even when I wasn’t. It was like getting out of bed and stretching and finding all my bones weren’t necessary, and dealing with that perfectly well while at the same time something inside me was screaming that there was something terribly wrong. It was like one of those dreams where you’re flying, and you know very well if you fall, you’re dead, but the flying is nice, so it’s half terror and half exaltation. You know? Part of me was scared to death, but meantime, the rest of me was just enjoying it. I imagine your frightened part was doing the same thing mine was, but you didn’t feel the other part. Assuming we both have the same parts.”

“Can I do that? Change like that?”

“If I understand what he was saying, evidently all it takes is a sea egg. I gave you one a long time ago. In Merhaven. What did you do with it?”

“I swallowed it. When I was with you in the princess’s bedroom, that first night, I got the very strong feeling your mother wanted me to do what you were doing, so when you gave it to me, I did it on faith, I guess. But I haven’t felt like changing!”

“Well, neither did I feel like changing. Not until I had to. I dreamed it at least twice before I actually did it; then I did it to save my life, there in the Vulture Tower, but I couldn’t remember doing it. Did you get what the Sea King said about Ghastain’s amulet?”

“It was an invitation to join the party.”

“And Huold did! The amulet wouldn’t have done anything for the duchess, even if she’d found it. Before Huold went to Tingawa, though, he left descendants we know nothing about. Some of them, obviously, were in the part of the world where you were raised. One or more of them were your ancestors.”

Abasio considered his mother and his father, the Drowned Woman and the Gang Leader. At least one of them had been a great-great-great-how-many-greats-grandchild of Huold the Heroic? How utterly unlikely that was! “And our part in all this is . . . ?”

“Our part came about because Xu-i-lok was the first woman,
the only woman,
who would be able to lay the sea eggs after she mated with . . . with someone who had the right genetics. Well, so . . . after she and my father . . . got together, she became pregnant with me and laid the first sea egg. She did it about the same time that . . .
creature
at Altamont sent her killing cloud! My mother hid it. She hid it and kept it hidden until I was old enough . . . or you were strong enough to help me find it. If she’d had time to create other sea eggs, all this wouldn’t have been necessary!”

He nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “But, since there was only one egg, you were her only hope. Precious Hope. Your mother wouldn’t have chosen all those years of pain if there had been another way.”

“But it was still only a hope, because then they had to find you! They needed to find a mate for me with the right genetics, just as my mother had needed to find my father. Because they needed one more. Oh, I hope she knew I was going to be a girl. If she didn’t know, how she must have worried. If I’d been a boy, it wouldn’t have done any good, because there’d have been no more sea eggs.”

He put his arms around her, pulling her close. “But you were a girl, for which I am very grateful.”

“Yes. I am female. And I’ve laid a dozen sea eggs, and I’ve given you one, and I’m producing more of them, so now we have enough to give others. And if the sea egg you swallowed works, we will have children who can change and our daughters will also be able to lay sea eggs. Our children will live. Any couple that we give sea eggs to will live and their children will live. We start by giving them to men and women, then they connect with one another. The right women. The right men.”