Water

KRAKEN

They wore traveller’s clothes, tight-laced against the sea wind, she all in grey, he in worn brown leather. They leaned on the taffrail and stared aft. Now they could see the pursuing sail, of which the lookout’s cry had told them an hour ago.

“Can it be one of my father’s?” she said.

“How should it have found us, with all the wide ocean to search?”

Now the captain came and watched with them for a while.

“That is no merchantman,” he said. “And no warship either. She follows too fast. My lord, you had best arm yourself. My lady, will you go below?”

Keeping to shadows, without seeming to be lurking, moving as if she were going nowhere in particular, Ailsa drifted along the mountain spur. Far above glittered the bright sunrise. Once over the first ridge, she changed course and headed directly along the slope to the cranny where she kept the spare harness. While she fetched it out and sorted it through, she whistled once, twice, and again. Now Carn came surging towards her, circled a couple of times to show that he didn’t need to have come at her call, but had chosen to do so, took the titbit from her hand and let her slide the harness over his head.

As she was fastening the cheek buckle, she heard the school bell ring, calling her for the last time. She did not falter. Nor did she smile as she used to when she was younger, from childish bravado, setting out on another illicit ride, worth the consequences for the fun of it. To-day was different. To-morrow the school bell would be silent for the holidays, and when it next rang, it would do so for others.

Why not wait for to-morrow, then, when she would be free to ride out as she chose?

For that very reason. To-day she would say good-bye to childhood.

Carn flicked his tail, impatient.

“Oh, all right,” she said aloud.

She clipped herself into the harness, laid her body along his with her hip beside the big forefin, tapped her tail against his flank, and streamlined herself to the rush of water as he surged away.

Now she did smile. It was impossible not to. To Ailsa, as to all merfolk, riding a blue-fin who really wanted to go was the finest thing in the ocean. You didn’t need to be a child to feel like that.

They returned to the taffrail, he in dark armour that had clearly seen service, she in a long green cloak. By now the following ship was hull up, half again both their size and speed. A black flag strained at the mast-head. The captain, still watching, turned and frowned.

“My lady, you should be below.”

“Are you going to fight?”

“What else can we do? If we surrender, they will still slit our throats. A lucky shot may bring down her mast.”

“Then I will fight too. My lord has spare pistols. I know the use of them.”

Blue-fin have three main paces—drift, pulse and surge. Carn was still at full surge, delighted to be going somewhere, anywhere. Ailsa twitched the bit in his mouth.

“Easy,” she told him. “Easy. We’ve got all day.”

He responded as much to her voice as to the bit and slowed to a steady pulse, heading up to just below the wave-roots, where the going was still smooth, and the water golden with morning. Later, when they were beyond pursuit, they would practise some wave leaping. Carn was still young, Ailsa’s first blue-fin—as a child she had ridden the smaller yellow-fin. The waves today were just about right for schooling him, steady in their march, tall enough for him to get the point, but not so tall that he might lose confidence.

Merfolk have an innate sense of direction, and Ailsa knew where she was heading, south-southwest, out over the Grand Gulf, a vast empty tract with immeasurable depths below. Nobody had much business out this way, so it was here that she was least likely to be seen. She had kept the same course for almost an hour when she heard the thunder.

Thunder, on a day like this? And there was something odd about the sound. It had the right deep roll but came jarring through the water as if it had begun there, somewhere ahead and to the left, rather than spreading more vaguely down from the distant sky.

Again! And Carn had faltered in his rhythm, as he did when surprised. And again. Ailsa turned him towards the sound. No, not thunder—too short a rumble, and too regular. A boom, a pause. Another boom, and pause. Another. Now straight ahead. After several more booms she began to sense the distance, a few hundred lengths only. And from above the surface, not below.

Half consciously she had kept aware of the pattern of broad stripes, light and dark, that marked the sunlit and shadowed slopes of the waves above, running slantwise to her path. She headed Carn to cross them square, picked one wave and, watching it intently, pulled him into a climb and flicked him to full surge, aiming a fin and a half below the moving wave crest. In the last few strokes she lashed her own tail in rhythm with his to add to the speed of the outstrike.

The idea was to leave the wave as high as possible, so that your two bodies were well up into the burning air while the blue-fin’s tail still had water to drive against. Then you saw how many wave crests you could clear before the instrike. But the confusion of the moving wave roots through which you were aiming made it harder than it may sound, and this time Ailsa struck so low that they barely cleared the first crest. This was just as well, as it gave them a soft instrike, and she wasn’t ready for it. She’d been distracted by what she’d glimpsed across Carn’s shoulder at the top of the leap. Two great ships of the airfolk.

There were old wrecks littered around the mountain, but Ailsa had never seen floating ships before, except in books.

White smoke puffed from the bows of the pursuer. Thunder rolled across the water. The shot fell wide. They did not see the splash. On the after-deck of the fleeing ship, sailors waited beside two small cannon, four to each gun. Another boom, and a splash astern and to starboard.

“Why do you not fire back?” said the woman. “And why so many of you? Are you not needed to sail the ship?”

One of the sailors answered.

“We haven’t the range with these popguns, my lady. We’ll fire as soon as our shot will reach them. Our best hope is to dismast her, and for that we must handle our guns as well as we’re able—two of us to lay and haul back after the recoil, one to swab out and load, and one to carry powder.”

“My lord and I can at least carry powder. It will be better than waiting. Show us.”

As they reached the companionway, the first shot struck. They felt the small boat’s timbers jar with the impact, somewhere aft, low down.

They followed their guide on into the dark.

Ailsa put Carn onto a lead rope and floated herself up to a little behind the crest of a wave, with only the top half of her head clear of the water. When that wave carried her astern, she dived and repositioned herself. Carn circled impatiently below her, but dutifully kept the lead rope just slack.

It took her a while to see, and then to understand, what the two ships were doing. Her eyes were lensed and shaped for underwater vision, and too dazzled by sunlight to pick out any detail. At first all she could be sure of was the two tall ships, the leading one bright, the other larger and more grim. They were making the thunder, and with it sent out white stuff like clouds, which rolled away on the wind. Then she heard a crash and a cry and the smaller ship seemed to stagger for a moment in its course. Squinting beneath half-closed lids, she saw airfolk at the front of the larger ship working some sort of dark pipe from which the thunder and the smoke emerged. And yes, the airfolk at the back of the small ship were doing the same, making a thinner boom, with less of the cloudy stuff. Ailsa realised that the airfolk were using the pipes to throw things at each other, not darts or spears, which were the merfolk’s weapons, but dark balls which they crammed into the pipes between booms.

A heavier crash, and cries of many voices. The smaller ship staggered, swung sideways, wallowed. Part of the towering white fins that seemed to drive it were twisted away, falling, collapsing. The other ship came surging on with a mass of airfolk gathered at its front. Sunlight flashed off weapons. There was a louder crash, bellows, screams, fighting. She watched, amazed and distressed, until two figures appeared at the front of the stricken ship, one white and glittering like sunlit spray, the other dark and tall. The fight continued, with the attackers driving forward. Sharp whipping cracks rapped out amid the yells. The white figure—Ailsa, unthinking, had drifted herself near enough to see that it was a woman—turned her head, watched the fight for a moment, turned back and spoke.

“It is time to go,” she said softly.

She had let her green cloak fall and stood at the rail in the dress that had been stitched for her marriage, though not to this man. Ten thousand seed pearls patterned its surface, and on it she had pinned every jewel she had brought, and they were many, for she was a king’s daughter. The sun dazzled off her as if she had been white sea foam. On her cheek was a smoky burn, the back-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.

“I 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, Carn’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 Carn’s body, round behind the big forefin. This was riding-school 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 Carn’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 Carn’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, Carn 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 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.

“Yes, we must take them back,” she said. “Or it will shake the mountain to pieces like it did Yellowreef.”

“But they still live,” said the king. “They are very different from us, but they are people nonetheless, and under the protection of our laws. I could not send any of our own people to such a death without their consent.”

“They’ve chosen already,” said Ailsa. “I saw them do it. And it’s the Kraken who’s keeping them alive. It’s got to be. It wants them alive. Perhaps it can’t keep them alive for ever.”

“Very well,” said the king. “The Council must decide. Before we vote, I will tell you that while I have been here I have twice felt this pillar shake beneath my hand, and I think my daughter has felt the same. I have never known it do so before. Now it seems to me that we have only two choices. We cannot simply keep them here. If they wake, they will die. So either we can take them back to where my daughter saw them sink, or we can tow them to some shore and strand them in air, to live or die as their own fate falls. Will those in favour of the former course please rise?”

It was close. By only four votes the Council decided to take the lovers back to where the Kraken, perhaps, waited for them.

Their dreams were darker, colder, slower yet. There was death at the edge of them.

They did the lovers full honour, schooling out as if for a royal funeral, the whole court, formally jewelled, to the sound of sad music. By now few of the merfolk had any doubt that they were doing what they must. Three times in the night the mountain had shaken so that all had felt it. Scouts reported that the limit had risen yet further up the slopes.

Ailsa rode near the front, knowing where she had gone yesterday. Carn was still too spent for work, so she had an elderly quiet blue-fin from the royal stables. The lovers lay on sleds weighted with boulders and buoyed with bladders so that they would not sink until they were needed to. Master Nostocal rode beside them, and took their pulses at intervals. He had reported that morning that their heartbeats were slower and weaker than before, and was afraid that whatever was keeping them alive was losing its ability to do so.

For a while, with so many people around her, Ailsa was not sure that she could sense the same immense mass of cold and dark that she had felt yesterday, tracking her across the sea bed. But even her stolid old animal was nervous, and the huntsmen riding scout on the flanks said they thought it was there. Slowly she began to feel more sure, and she knew for certain when the great tide below came to a halt.

“This is the place,” she said.

They did not doubt her. They could tell, too.

The music changed. The merfolk gathered round the sleds and held them in position while the air was released from the bladders. Ailsa, full of grief at what she accepted must be done, was watching the stream of silvery bubbles shoot towards the wave-roof when a cold, dark thought slid into her mind. Not, this time, a question. A command.

“It wants me too,” she said.

“No,” said the king.

“I must go with them, or it will break the mountain.”

“No, I will go,” cried someone. Others joined, until the king raised his hand for silence.

“It’s got to be me,” said Ailsa.

He stared at her, and away, and bowed his head.

“Hold the sleds there,” he said, and took her to one side.

“You are certain of this?” he said.

“Yes. It told me. As if it had spoken.”

“Will you come back?”

“It didn’t say.”

Hard lines creased his face. This was how he had looked at her mother’s funeral.

“Very well,” he said.

She raised her hands to remove her diadem. To do the lovers honour, she had put on the same jewels as the night before, but there was no point in taking them with her. If she did not come back, her cousin Porphyry would become Prince. He should have them, for his wife when he married.

“No, wear them,” said her father. “You must go as what you are, a king’s daughter.”

They went back to where the sleds were waiting. Ailsa took the middle of the rope that joined them, raised her forehead for her father’s kiss, and nodded. The merfolk loosed their hold and the weight of the boulders carried her down. The light faded, more slowly than when Carn had dived at full surge. Ailsa was only vaguely afraid. The terror she should have felt was somehow numbed, like a pain being kept at bay by one of Master Nostocal’s drugs. She could not guess what the Kraken wanted with her. Perhaps it would keep her in some strange half death, like that of the lovers, in its kingdom of dark and cold. The massive pressure of water closed around her. Light died. It became dark as night, dark as a starless midnight, darker than any night. With a plunge of cold she felt the limit pass.

Beyond it waited the Kraken.

Ailsa was aware of it in her mind, not through her bodily senses. In her mind she could feel the immeasurable length of it on either side of her, its immeasurable depth below, dark beyond black, cold beyond ice. It told her to let go of the rope. In her mind she saw the tendrils of dark that wreathed from it and took the lovers, playing over their bodies. But now there was light, light seen with her eyes, a dazzling spark as one of the tendrils lifted a jewel from the woman’s dress. The light blazed from the jewel as the tendril turned it this way and that, and then vanished as the Kraken took it into itself.

Other jewels blazed or sparkled or glowed in turn, and were lost. The seed pearls on the woman’s covering woke into an iridescent design which then flowed away, rippling like some luminous sea-thing, into the Kraken’s inward blackness. When they were gone, Ailsa was once more in total dark.

Now in her mind she saw the Kraken moving its tendrils to inspect the lovers. Despite the weight on the sled they had fallen no farther. Light glowed again, but this time she was unsure whether she was seeing it through her eyes or in her mind, faint streaking glimmers moving to and fro across and through the immense dark mass—dots of light, she thought, but moving so fast that they seemed to be glowing lines. She had no idea what this meant.

When the Kraken had done with the lovers, it briefly considered the sleds on which they lay, then turned its attention to Ailsa. Sensing the movement of the black tendrils towards her, she raised her hands, removed her diadem and offered it to them. As they touched it, the sapphire shone with a pure, pale light, more brilliant, more truly a jewel, than she had ever known it. Always before it had merely refracted the light that fell on it, tingeing that light with its colour. Now it was as if the Kraken was summoning out of it the sapphire’s inner light, and drawing that light into its own blackness, just as cold calls heat into it but heat cannot call cold.

When the blue blaze of the sapphire was gone, she offered one by one her carcanet, pendant, earrings and tail bracelet and watched them sparkle or flame at the Kraken’s touch. There was one small diamond in the carcanet that Ailsa had never particularly noticed as being different from any of the others which now shone out with the brilliance of Orion. When the Kraken had done with each piece, it took it into itself. Then it turned its attention to her.

The tendrils were soft, more feathery than the finest sea fern. She could scarcely feel their touch as they explored her shape, lingering a little at the waist where the smooth skin ended and the scales began. She saw again the strange darting lights, fewer than there had been with the lovers. When they had explored her tailfin, the tendrils moved up her body and gathered at the back of her head. Three times yesterday she had been asked the same dark question, but had not understood. Now she did.

The Kraken was not much interested in her. She was an oddity, with her airfolk torso and fish tail, but the ocean teems with oddities and the Kraken knew as much about them as it wished to. No, what absorbed it, what had caused it to move its vast mass across the ocean floor and shake the mountain in its anger, was the lovers. What could Ailsa tell it about them?

This time she did not need to put her story into words, which meant that she could tell it all, exactly as it had been. She felt that she could show, did in fact show the Kraken every sunlit droplet that had whipped from the wave-tops and every wisp of cloud-stuff that had puffed from the black tubes as the fight went on. She created again the arc of the sword through the air, created the precise poise, serene, passionate, unrepeatable, in which the lovers had balanced on the rail while the struggle had raged beyond them and the woman had buckled the sword belt round them so that they should go down unseparated into darkness. She created the final splash, and the attackers crowding to the rail.

At this point the Kraken seemed to lose interest. While Ailsa had been creating the moment, its whole mass had glimmered with a network of the streaking lines, but now these mostly died. At the same time her own mind went dull. If she had gone on to tell it, about her dive to reach the lovers, she would have had to do so with ordinary, fuzzy, gappy memory. The brilliance of full recall was gone. That was something that the Kraken had summoned from her, much as it had summoned the inner light from her jewels. As the tendrils withdrew from the back of her head, she felt a vague sense of loss. It crossed her mind that the Kraken would now take her into itself too. She was too numb, too exhausted, to be frightened by the idea.

As she waited for whatever would happen next, she became aware of the cold, and the pressure. 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, sharp-cornered 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’ 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.