Water (24 page)

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.

“
L 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, Cam’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 Cam’s body, round behind the big forefin. This was ridingschool 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 Cam’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 Cam’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, Cam 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.

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