by Kate Elliott
The cold water eased the pain in Alain’s hand, although a second finger had begun to swell.
Two Fingers followed the phoenix’s trail down a tunnel that ran as straight as an arrow’s flight. One torch guttered out, and he lit the second, but even so they walked on and on until Alain’s feet began to hurt from the unrelenting stone. He could not bend three of his fingers, but decided it was simply better not to look at them. Adica tried to talk to him, but he shushed her, afraid she would let her fear for him delay them.
The second torch spent itself, and Two Fingers lit the third. On they went. Eventually, the rock floor gave way to grainy sand.
Alain stopped to take in a deep breath. “Salt water.” The sharp scent cleared his head. His headache eased. He could not close his hand. It felt like it had swollen to twice its normal size, but when he looked at it in the dim light, it didn’t look much different.
Two Fingers extinguished the torch. There remained light enough to see Two Fingers place the partially burned torch onto a stack of other torches, some fresh, some half spent, set into a niche carved into the sloping wall. They emerged then out of a narrow cave’s mouth onto a strand so long that, with dusk falling, Alain could see no end to it on either side. Heavy clouds engulfed the sky, an angry horizon marked by the receding storm. The wind stung his fingers, its touch like the bite of the snake all over again. Angry red stripes lanced up his forearm, to his elbow, but where they reached the skrolin armband they simply ceased, as though cut off.
“Let me see,” said Adica, more insistently now. He held out his arm. Where her fingers probed gingerly, pain flared. He looked away, unwilling to see the angry swelling turn white where she pressed on it, as if it were already dead and rotting.
Sorrow and Rage took off running down the beach, stretching their legs at last. Many tunnels studded the cliff face that backed the strand. A ship lay beached on the sand, drawn up out of tide’s reach: sleek curves and pale, gleaming wood.
Seeing him stare, Adica spoke as she continued to probe. In a way, her matter-of-fact voice took his mind off the pain and off the fear of what the snake’s poison might be working in him. “Only the Cursed Ones build such beautiful ships, as fair as the stars and strong enough to sail out of sight of land. In such ships, the Cursed Ones crossed the world ocean. They came from the west many generations ago, in the time of the ancient queens. Here in human lands they crafted a new empire built out of human bone and human blood.”
“Ai, God, look.” He choked, wincing as Adica’s touch reached the painful bite.
The phoenix had gotten here before them. The ship hadn’t burned, but its sails had. The planks had scorched but remained intact. Dead littered the beach like flotsam.
Not even an enemy deserved a death like this one, rent to pieces, burned, and mangled.
“I’ll make a poultice,” said Adica, letting go of his hand.
“Where has the phoenix gone?” asked Laoina nervously, but she headed down along the shore to collect weapons off the dead.
Was that movement, out on the sand? He hurried forward to kneel beside a body, one among two dozen, a formidable raiding party with their bronze swords and spears, and wooden shields overlaid with a sheet of bronze embossed with cunning scenes of war.
Formidable, except that they were all dead now.
The man moaned, gurgling. His crested helmet had been half torn off his head, his wolf’s mask ripped clean off, but the death wound had come when claws had punctured his lungs.
“Poor suffering soul,” murmured Alain, kneeling beside him. His proud face reminded Alain bitterly of Prince Sanglant: the same bronze complexion, high, broad cheekbones, and deep-set eyes, although this man’s eyes, like a deer’s, were a depthless brown. Despite his wounds, he hissed a curse through bloody lips when he saw Alain looming over him, and in an odd way, Alain felt he could understand him, a dutiful soldier defiant to the last: “Although you defeat me, you’ll never defeat my people, beast’s child.”
“Hush, now,” said Alain. “I hope you find peace, Brother—”
Laoina stepped up beside him and drove her spear through the man’s throat. “Sa’anit! So dies another one!” She spat on the Cursed One’s face.
Alain rose. “What need to treat him cruelly when he already dies?”
“How is a quick death a cruel one? That is better than the death his kind give to their human slaves!”
“So may they do, but that doesn’t mean we must become as they are! If we let them make us savages, then we have lost more than one battle. If we lose mercy, then we may as well become like the beasts of the wild.” With his good hand, he gestured toward the carnage left by the phoenix. Blood stained the sand and leaked in rivulets out into the sea, soon lost among the surging waves.
Laoina stabbed her spear into the sand to clean the blood off of it. When she looked up, she met his gaze, warily respectful. “Maybe there is truth in what you say. But they still must die.” Then she flushed, looking at his wounded arm.
“I won’t die,” he promised her. But he thought, suddenly and vividly, of Lavastine and of the way Bloodheart’s curse had, so slowly, turned the count into stone. Yet when Alain touched his swollen, hot fingers they hurt terribly, and he could still feel bone, flesh, and skin. Even to turn his wrist caused enough pain to make him dizzy. But he wasn’t turning to stone.
The sea hissed as waves sighed up onto the beach and slid away again, leaving foam behind.
“Hei!” By the cliff, Two Fingers pulled a bush away to reveal a cave’s mouth.
Alain stayed on watch while the others dragged out a slender boat, deep-hulled, with clinker-built sides, a steering oar, four oar ports on each side, and a single mast, and shoved it down over the sand and into the water before fastening down all their gear and looted weapons as ballast. Alain whistled, and the hounds came galloping back, eager and fresh, to pile in with them.
Two Fingers unwound eight heavy ropes fastened to hooks at the stem of the ship and flung them over the side. He stationed himself at the stem. While the boat rocked on incoming waves, he drew a bone flute out of his pouch and began to play.
They came, first, like ripples in the water. Two creatures reared up from the waves, their bodies glistening as foam spilled around them. They wore faces that had a vaguely human shape, with the sharp teeth of a predator. The skin of their faces and their shoulders and torsos had a sheeny, slick texture, as pale as maggots. The first dove, swiftly, and slapped the surface of the water with a muscular tail.
Alain stared. “He’s summoned the merfolk! I never thought—” He reeled as the boat rocked under his feet. How long had it been since he had dreamed of Stronghand?
But he was dead, wasn’t he? The dead did not dream, and he had not dreamed of Stronghand since the centaur shaman had brought him to Adica’s side. In a way, staring at the sea, it was like dreaming of Stronghand all over again.
If he was already dead, then he could not die again, even from a poisoned snake bite. He laughed, grasped Adica’s shoulder, and turned her so that he could kiss her on the cheek.
“Maybe the poison makes you lose your wits,” muttered Laoina.
Adica’s frowning apprehension was as strong as the salt smell of the sea, yet she was too practical to weep and moan. She crouched in the boat and began to rummage through her pack while, as Two Fingers played the flute, the merfolk circled in reluctantly.
A second pair arrived, and a third, and suddenly the boat lurched under Alain, and he sat down hard onto the floorboards, clutching at the side with his good hand. His staff clattered against the sternpost. He caught it just before it tumbled into the water. The hounds settled down, whining softly. Laoina spoke soft words, as though she were praying, and stared in wonder and horror as the merfolk caught the ropes in their clawed hands and, to the tune of Two Fingers’ flute, pulled the boat onto the sea.
A fourth pair arrived, then a fifth and a sixth, until there were always some circling and some towing, their bod
ies a slick curve against the dark waters. The strand and the cliff receded until even the gleam of the crippled ship left stranded on the beach vanished from sight.
Alain’s arm throbbed steadily, all the way up to the armband. His ears rang slightly, and he felt feverish, or maybe he was only shivering because of the wind and the cold sea spray.
“Drink this.” Adica set the rim of a leather cup to his lips, and he swallowed obediently. Afterward, she pressed a cool mash against the swollen bite and wrapped it tightly under a bit of wool cloth.
Night fell. Alain could not see the merfolk at all, yet the salt spray stung his lips and eyes and the boat heaved and danced under him as they pressed onward. His hair, his clothing, his skin: all were sticky with salt. Adica had fallen asleep under her fur cloak.
He dozed, and woke, cold, damp, and miserable with his head pillowed on Sorrow’s massive back. Two Fingers stood tall and straight by the sternpost, playing. Alain knew a spell when he heard one. Should Two Fingers falter, they might well be abandoned here in the middle of the sea, left to drift and, finally, die of thirst despite the wealth of water. Alain found a waterskin but drank sparingly, even though he had gotten very thirsty.
For a long while he sat in silence, in the darkness, his hand and arm hurting too much to let him sleep, as the boat split the waters and raced onward. The merfolk made clicking sounds so muted that at first he thought it was the hounds’ nails ticking on wood. But the pitch and distance of these clicks changed and shifted: in this way the merfolk communicated each to the others, punctuated by sudden wild hoots and spits of water arcing skyward.
He swam in and out of waking as he shivered, dreaming that he could understand their talk: “Turn them out of their shell and into the world so we can eat them. Nay, the queen bids us. We cannot refuse her song.”
Sometimes when they changed direction, swells hit them sideways and water spilled over the side. Every time cold seawater sluiced around his feet, he bailed while the hounds whimpered. Here, out on the sea, the two hounds scarcely resembled the fearsome creatures they were on land. To the merfolk, whose element this was, the dogs would no doubt be nothing more than a tidy morsel gulped down. Nor could the human passengers expect any mercy. He didn’t like to think of what would happen to one who fell over the side.
The rhythm of the waves chopping at the underside of the boat lulled him into a doze even as his blood pulsed hotly in his hand. He slept fitfully, dreaming of a great chasm opening in the heavens as the earth split beneath his feet and plunged him into an abyss with no bottom into which he fell and fell and fell.… He had sworn to protect her, just as he had sworn to protect Lavastine, and now he had failed.
“Alain.”
He started awake, almost crying out in relief to find that it was Adica, alive and well, shaking him gently. Her face was a shadow against the sky, like a ghost, nothing more than eyes, nose, and mouth.
“I feared for you, beloved.” She touched his lips, brushed her fingers lightly over his forehead, and checked his pulse at his throat.
“I am well enough.” He tested his hand but still could not flex it. It felt stiff as a board and twice as large as normal. But he could bend his elbow, very slowly.
Up by the stem, Laoina crouched behind Two Fingers, staring into the sea.
“You must see.” Adica’s voice had an odd hitch in it.
The waters sang around them, an eerie lilt, like the sea wind streaming through a hundred whistles. Light gleamed from the watery depths. He crawled over the nets splayed over the ballast and, clinging to the side, looked out over the waters.
There was a city under the sea.
A whorl of light, like a vast shell, spread across the seabed below them. It seemed to go on and on and on in a tangle of curving walls, accretions of alabaster or palest living shell coated with phosphorus that pulsed in time to the waves above, or some respiration of the sea unknown and unknowable to him and to all creatures who live in the world of air.
A crowd of merfolk rose to the brink of sea and sky to swarm around the ship. They, too, seemed trapped by Two Finger’s flute. Their dance, as they swam in tight circles and spirals, winding in and out around the ship as it streamed through the waters, seemed born as much out of resentment as enchantment. Magic binds. They were powerless against the spell he wove.
At times, a pair of merfolk streaked in, taking over the ropes; the tired pair melted away, lost as they sank into the darkness. Their clicking and singing serenaded their voyage, yet it was no restful lullaby. ‘What lies beyond the Quickening? How can magic out of the thin world bind us? We could eat them if it weren’t for that shell. Do they breathe in the Slow, too?’
He was so tired that his drifting mind wove those noises into intelligible language. Were the merfolk simply beasts? Stronghand had not thought so. Stronghand had negotiated with them, trading blood for blood, the currency he knew best. They had shown signs of intelligence, and here lay greater evidence before Alain’s eyes: a vast city.
How was it possible to know what was truth and what was falsely seen, the outer seeming that concealed the inner heart? How could one person ever pull aside all the veils that shrouded his sight and muffled his hearing?
At last the whorled city passed away and the swarming seafolk dropped behind, diving back to their home, all but the ones who towed their craft. At intervals a new pair surfaced abruptly to take the turn of ones exhausted. In this manner, as night passed, they went on, and at last Alain slept.
3
DAWN bled light over the waters and, as the sun rose, Adica saw birds, the harbinger of land. Driftwood bobbed thoughtfully along the swells. Whips of kelp slithered along the hull before being left behind. A trio of porpoises surfaced, blowing, and vanished.
Adica turned away from this appealing vista to examine Alain’s hand and arm. Although the skin was still swollen to a bitter, nasty red, it looked no worse than it had yesterday. Surely, if it meant to kill him, he would be suffering more by now.
“There!” cried Laoina.
White flashed along the horizon. Was it land?
“It is a ship,” said Alain.
“They will kill us if they catch us.” Laoina hooked her elbow around the mast. She shinnied up the bar, trying to get a better look, and swore vigorously. “It is ship of the Cursed Ones.”
Two Fingers did not falter, although he looked exhausted. The merfolk swam on, plunging through the waves with the ropes taut behind them. The ship creaked and moaned as it hit choppier waters.
Adica fumbled in her pouch, her hands cold and stiff and sticky with salt. She blew on her fingers to warm them before struggling to open the strings of the pouch, now swollen with brine. Inside, she found her tiny bundle of precious Queen’s Broom and a braid of dried thistle. She twined the Queen’s Broom into her bodice so that it wouldn’t fall, and with some effort struck flame, with her flint, and set the braid of thistle alight.
As it burned, she sang a spell:
“Flee now, thistle,
The lesser from the greater,
The greater from the lesser.
Let there be no meeting
And no bloodshed.”
Fighting the rocking ship, she lurched toward the stern. The ship plunged down a high swell and she fell hard against the sternpost. Alain caught her with his good hand before she fell overboard. Hanging there, she watched the distant ship heave to and change direction. Had they spotted them?
Quickly, she fastened the Queen’s Broom to the sternpost and, with the sting of the burning thistle still in her nostrils, sang the spell again.
As they watched, it became apparent that the other ship had not seen them. It came no closer and in time vanished over the horizon.
Shoreline rose in the distance, more green than brown. They hit the first line of surf just as the ropes went slack and the merfolk rolled away, letting the swells carry them toward shore. The sea creatures lolled in the waves, watching. One bold merchild swam so close that Adica
saw the tiny mouths snapping at the ends of its hair, like eels. Beady eyes studied the ship with greedy anticipation just before the merchild dove under the boat. Its back jostled the hull, rocking them enough that Two Fingers had to grab at the sternpost to keep from being thrown over the side. Abruptly, the merfolk swarmed menacingly around the boat, only to retreat as the waves dissolved into breakers.
With the breaking waves throwing spray over them, Alain made to jump out of the ship and guide them in, but Two Fingers grabbed his good arm.
“Stay!” Laoina was quick to translate. “Beware the water. The merfolk have sharp teeth and do not wish us any kindness.”
“True enough.”
The merfolk stayed beyond the breakers, but one coursed in, in their wake, rolled, and spun away again, letting the outgoing waves drag it off the shore. When the ship finally scraped bottom, Alain leaped off, followed by the rest, and they dragged the boat up onto the shore, out of reach of the tide. The dogs yelped and bounded around, chasing their own tails, barking and racing.
Two Fingers waded out to his knees in the waves, facing the sea. The waters hissed and ebbed around his legs. He raised both hands. “Thank you, sisters and brothers. You, also, have done your share, if unwillingly. I return to you this bone that once belonged to your queen.”
He flung the bone flute high and long. It disappeared into the waters. A swarm of bodies churned the sea where it had fallen. As suddenly, all trace of the merfolk vanished. The sea sighed in along the beach, and the morning sun drenched the sand with gold. The only sound was the water and the bubbling song of a curlew.
Far out, movement flickered. A single gray tail flicked into sight, slapped down. Then, nothing. The merfolk had gone.
“So.” Laoina turned to take in the view. The beach itself, more pebbles than sand, stretched eastward out of sight, bounded on the west by a low headland evergreen with scrub and trees grown distorted under the constant pressure of wind. Hills rose up behind them, pockmarked with shallow caves. “Let’s find shelter and something fresh to eat.”