Water (25 page)

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

Cam. 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 Cam 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, un-chambered spur along which Ailsa

had slipped out that morning to find Cam. 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