Water (27 page)

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, sharpcornered 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’s 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.

“Now you’d better get to bed. No. Leave the jewel with me. You’ll be needing a new diadem.”

“What will happen to the airfolk?”

“All we can do is somehow return them to their element.”

They dreamed of sunlight and of leaves, and woke to the lap of wavelets on sand. They sat up

and looked at each other, bewildered. She wore her marriage dress still, but every jewel upon it,

down to the last tiny seed pearl, was gone. So was his armour, though his sword belt was across

his shoulder and round his waist, with the sword in its scabbard. Their hair and garments were

wet, and their flesh was pale and wrinkled, showing that they had been long in water. They felt

sore around their chests, as if they had been bound around with ropes beneath the arms. Deep

chill lingered in their bodies, that now seemed to drink hungrily at the morning sun.

They looked around. They were on a silvery beach, with blue sky overhead and a rippling blue

sea before them. Behind rose heavy green woods, full of shadow. They had been lying upon two

wooden sleds made from old sea-worn timbers and lashed at the joins with ropes twisted from an

unfamiliar coarse fibre. The runners of the sleds touched the highest mark left by the receding

tide, and the hummocked sand against the head timbers showed that they had been shoved rather

than dragged up the beach. No footprints led inland, and the waves had washed out any marks

that might have been left below high tide.

They helped each other to their feet and embraced. Dazed still, neither spoke. When they

separated, the man eased his sword in its scabbard and settled it home. The woman pointed at

what might be a path into the trees. They walked towards it, but when they were almost there, the

woman, as if on an impulse, put her hand on his arm and stopped him. They turned.

“
Our thanks,
”
she called to the blank reaches of ocean.

They turned again and disappeared into the trees.

Ailsa watched them go.

A Pool in the Desert

by Robin McKinley

There were no deserts in the Homeland. Perhaps that was why she dreamed of deserts.

She had had her first desert dreams when she was quite young, and still had time to read

storybooks and imagine herself in them; but deserts were only one of the things she dreamed

about in those days. She dreamed about knights in armour and glorious quests, and sometimes in

these dreams she was a knight and sometimes she was a lovely lady who watched a particular

knight and hoped that, when he won the tournament, it would be she to whom he came, and

stooped on bended knee, and ... and sometimes she dreamed that she was a lady who tied her hair

up and pulled a helmet down over it and over her face, and won the tournament herself, and

everyone watching said, Who is that strange knight? For I have never seen his like. After her

mother fell ill and she no longer had time to read, she still dreamed, but the knights and quests

and tournaments dropped out of her dreams, and only the deserts remained.

For years in these desert dreams she rode a slender, graceful horse with an arched neck, and it

flew over the sand as if it had wings; but when she drew up on the crest of a dune and looked

behind her, there would be the shallow half circles of hoofprints following them, hummocking

the wind-ridges and bending the coarse blades of the sand-grass. Her horse would dance under