Kokinja went on backing into moonlight, which calmed her, and had just begun to swim cautiously around the island when it moved. Eyes as big and yellow-white as lighthouse lamps turned slowly to keep her in view, while an enormous, seemingly formless body lost any resemblance to an island, heaving itself over to reveal limbs ending in grotesquely huge claws. Centered between the foremost of them were two moon-white pincers, big enough, clearly, to twist the skull off a sperm whale. The sound it uttered was too low for Kokinja to catch, but she felt it plainly in the sea.
She knew what it was then, and could only hope that her voice would reach whatever the creature used for ears. She said, “Great Paikea, I am Kokinja. I am very small, and I mean no one any harm. Please, can you tell me where I may find my father, the Shark God?”
The lighthouse eyes truly terrified her then, swooping toward her from different directions, with no head or face behind them. She realized that they were on long whiplike stalks, and that Paikea’s diamond-shaped head was sheltered under a scarlet carapace studded with scores of small, sharp spines. Kokinja was too frightened to move, which was as well, for Paikea spoke to her in the water, saying against her skin, “Be still, child, that I may see you more clearly, and not bite you in two by mistake. It has happened so.” Then Kokinja, who had already swum half an ocean, thought that she might never again move from where she was.
She waited a long time for the great creature to speak again, but was not at all prepared for Paikea’s words when they did come. “I could direct you to your father—I could even take you to him—but I will not. You are not ready.”
When Kokinja could at last find words to respond, she demanded, “Not ready? Who are you to say that I am not ready to see my own father?” Mirali and Keawe would have known her best then: she was Kokinja, and anything she feared she challenged.
“What your father has to say to you, you are not yet prepared to hear,” came the voice in the sea. “Stay with me a little, Shark God’s daughter. I am not what your father is, but I may perhaps be a better teacher for you.” When Kokinja hesitated, and clearly seemed about to refuse, Paikea continued, “Child, you have nowhere else to go but home—and I think you are not ready for that, either. Climb on my back now, and come with me.” Even for Kokinja, that was an order.
Paikea took her—once she had managed the arduous and tiring journey from claw to leg to mountainside shoulder to a deep, hard hollow in the carapace that might have been made for a frightened rider—to an island (a real one this time, though well smaller than her own) bright with birds and flowers and wild fruit. When the birds’ cries and chatter ceased for a moment, she could hear the softer swirl of running water farther inland, and the occasional thump of a falling coconut from one of the palms that dotted the beach. It was a lonely island, being completely uninhabited, but very beautiful.
There Paikea left her to swim ashore, saying only, “Rest,” and nothing more. She did as she was bidden, sleeping under bamboo trees, waking to eat and drink, and sleeping again, dreaming always of her mother and brother at home. Each dream seemed more real than the one before, bringing Mirali and Keawe closer to her, until she wept in her sleep, struggling to keep from waking. Yet when Paikea came again, after three days, she demanded audaciously, “What wisdom do you think you have for me that I would not hear if it came from my father? I have no fear of anything he may say to me.”
“You have very little fear at all, or you would not be here,” Paikea answered her. “You feared me when we first met, I think—but two nights’ good sleep, and you are plainly past that.” Kokinja thought she discerned something like a chuckle in the wavelets lapping against her feet where she sat, but she could not be sure. Paikea said, “But courage and attention are not the same thing. Listening is not the same as hearing. You may be sure I am correct in this, because I know everything.”
It was said in such a matter-of-fact manner that Kokinja had to battle back the impulse to laugh. She said, with all the innocence she could muster, “I thought it was my father who was supposed to know everything.”
“Oh, no,” Paikea replied quite seriously. “The only thing the Shark God has ever known is how to be the Shark God. It is the one thing he is supposed to be—not a teacher, not a wise master, and certainly not a father or a husband. But they will take human form, the gods will, and that is where the trouble begins, because they none of them know how to be human—how can they, tell me that?” The eye-stalks abruptly plunged closer, as though Paikea were truly waiting for an enlightening answer. “I have always been grateful for my ugliness; for the fact that there is no way for me to disguise it, no temptation to hide in a more comely shape and pretend to believe that I am what I pretend. Because I am certain I would do just that, if I could. It is lonely sometimes, knowing everything.”
Again Kokinja felt the need to laugh; but this time it was somehow easier not to, because Paikea was obviously anxious for her to understand his words. But she fought off sympathy as well, and confronted Paikea defiantly, saying, “You really think that we should never have been born, don’t you, my brother and I?”
Paikea appeared to be neither surprised nor offended by her bold words. “Child, what I know is important—what I think is not important at all. It is the same way with the Shark God.” Kokinja opened her mouth to respond hotly, but the great crab-monster moved slightly closer to shore, and she closed it again. Paikea said, “He is fully aware that he should never have taken a human wife, created a human family in the human world. And he knows also, as he was never meant to know, that when your mother dies—as she will—when you and your brother in time die, his heart will break. No god is supposed to know such a thing; they are simply not equipped to deal with it. Do you understand me, brave and foolish girl?”
Kokinja was not sure whether she understood, and less sure of whether she even wanted to understand. She said slowly, “So he thinks that he should never see us, to preserve his poor heart from injury and grief? Perhaps he thinks it will be for our own good? Parents always say that, don’t they, when they really mean for their own convenience. Isn’t that what they say, wise Paikea?”
“I never knew my parents,” Paikea answered thoughtfully.
“And I have never known him,” snapped Kokinja. “Once a year he comes to lie with his wife, to snap up his goat, to look at his children as we sleep. But what is that to a wife who longs for her husband, to children aching for a real father? God or no god, the very least he could have done would have been to tell us himself what he was, and not leave us to imagine him, telling ourselves stories about why he left our beautiful mother…. why he didn’t want to be with us….” She realized, to her horror, that she was very close to tears, and gulped them back as she had done with laughter. “I will never forgive him,” she said. “Never.”
“Then why have you swum the sea to find him?” asked Paikea. It snapped its horrid pale claws as a human will snap his fingers, waiting for her answer with real interest.
“To tell him that I will never forgive him,” Kokinja answered. “So there is something even Paikea did not know.” She felt triumphant, and stopped wanting to cry.
“You are still not ready,” said Paikea, and was abruptly gone, slipping beneath the waves without a ripple, as though its vast body had never been there. It did not return for another three days, during which Kokinja explored the island, sampling every fruit that grew there, fishing as she had done at sea when she desired a change of diet, sleeping when she chose, and continuing to nurse her sullen anger at her father.
Finally, she sat on the beach with her feet in the water, and she called out, “Great Paikea, of your kindness, come to me, I have a riddle to ask you.” None of the sea creatures among whom she had been raised could ever resist a riddle, and she did not see why it should be any different even for the Master of All Sea Monsters.
Presently she heard the mighty creature’s voice saying, “You yourself are as much a riddle to me as any you may ask.” Paikea surfa
ced close enough to shore that Kokinja felt she could have reached out and touched its head. It said, “Here I am, Shark God’s daughter.”
“This is my riddle,” Kokinja said. “If you cannot answer it, you who know everything, will you take me to my father?”
“A most human question,” Paikea replied, “since the riddle has nothing to do with the reward. Ask, then.”
Kokinja took a long breath. “Why would any god ever choose to sire sons and daughters with a mortal woman? Half-divine, yet we die—half-supreme, yet we are vulnerable, breakable—half-perfect, still we are forever crippled by our human hearts. What cruelty could compel an immortal to desire such unnatural children?”
Paikea considered. It closed its huge, glowing eyes on their stalks; it waved its claws this way and that; it even rumbled thoughtfully to itself, as a man might when pondering serious matters. Finally Paikea’s eyes opened, and there was a curious amusement in them as it regarded Kokinja. She did not notice this, being young.
“Well riddled,” Paikea said. “For I know the answer, but have not the right to tell you. So I cannot.” The great claws snapped shut on the last word, with a grinding clash that hinted to Kokinja how fearsome an enemy Paikea could be.
“Then you will keep your word?” Kokinja asked eagerly. “You will take me where my father is?”
“I always keep my word,” answered Paikea, and sank from sight. Kokinja never saw him again.
But that evening, as the red sun was melting into the green horizon, and the birds and fish that feed at night were setting about their business, a young man came walking out of the water toward Kokinja. She knew him immediately, and her first instinct was to embrace him. Then her heart surged fiercely within her, and she leaped to her feet, challenging him. “So! At last you have found the courage to face your own daughter. Look well, sea-king, for I have no fear of you, and no worship.” She started to add, “Nor any love, either,” but that last caught in her throat, just as had happened to her mother Mirali when she scolded a singing boy for invading her dreams.
The Shark God spoke the words for her. “You have no reason in the world to love me.” His voice was deep and quiet, and woke strange echoes in her memory of such a voice overheard in candlelight in the sweet, safe place between sleep and waking. “Except, perhaps, that I have loved your mother from the moment I first saw her. That will have to serve as my defense, and my apology as well. I have no other.”
“And a pitiful enough defense it is,” Kokinja jeered. “I asked Paikea why a god should ever choose to father a child with a mortal, and he would not answer me. Will you?” The Shark God did not reply at once, and Kokinja stormed on. “My mother never once complained of your neglect, but I am not my mother. I am grateful for my half-heritage only in that it enabled me to seek you out, hide as you would. For the rest, I spit on my ancestry, my birthright, and all else that connects me to you. I just came to tell you that.”
Having said this, she began to weep, which infuriated her even more, so that she actually clenched her fists and pounded the Shark God’s shoulders while he stood still, making no response. Shamed as she was, she ceased both activities soon enough, and stood silently facing her father with her head high and her wet eyes defiant. For his part, the Shark God studied her out of his own unreadable black eyes, moving neither to caress nor to punish her, but only—as it seemed to Kokinja—to understand the whole of what she was. And to do her justice, she stared straight back, trying to do the same.
When the Shark God spoke at last, Mirali herself might not have known his voice, for the weariness and grief in it. He said, “Believe as you will, but until your mother came into my life, I had no smallest desire for children, neither with beings like myself, nor with any mortal, however beautiful she might be. We do find humans dangerously appealing, all of us, as is well-known—perhaps precisely because of their short lives and the delicacy of their construction—and many a deity, unable to resist such haunting vulnerability, has scattered half-divine descendants all over your world. Not I; there was nothing I could imagine more contemptible than deliberately to create such a child, one who would share fully in neither inheritance, and live to curse me for it, as you have done.” Kokinja flushed and looked down, but offered no contrition for anything she had said. The Shark God said mildly, “As well you made no apology. Your mother has never once lied to me, nor should you.”
“Why should I ever apologize to you?” Kokinja flared up again. “If you had no wish for children, what are my brother and I doing here?” Tears threatened again, but she bit them savagely back. “You are a god—you could always have kept us from being born! Why are we here?”
To her horror, her legs gave way under her then, and she sank to her knees, still not weeping, but finding herself shamefully weak with rage and confusion. Yet when she looked up, the Shark God was kneeling beside her, for all the world like a playmate helping her to build a sand castle. It was she who stared at him without expression now, while he regarded her with the terrifying pity that belongs to the gods alone. Kokinja could not bear it for more than a moment; but every time she turned her face away, her father gently turned her toward him once more. He said, “Daughter of mine, do you know how old I am?”
Kokinja shook her head silently. The Shark God said, “I cannot tell you in years, because there were no such things at my beginning. Time was very new then, and Those who were already here had not yet decided whether this was…. suitable, can you understand me, dear one?” The last two words, heard for the first time in her life, caused Kokinja to shiver like a small animal in the rain. Her father did not appear to notice.
“I had no parents, and no childhood, such as you and your brother have had—I simply was, and always had been, beyond all memory, even my own. All true enough, to my knowledge—and then a leaky outrigger canoe bearing a sleeping brown girl drifted across my endless life, and I, who can never change…. I changed. Do you hear what I am telling you, daughter of that girl, daughter who hates me?”
The Shark God’s voice was soft and uncertain. “I told your mother that it was good that I saw her and you and Keawe only once in a year—that if I allowed myself that wonder even a day more often I might lose myself in you, and never be able to find myself again, nor ever wish to. Was that cowardly of me, Kokinja? Perhaps so, quite likely unforgivably so.” It was he who looked away now, rising and turning to face the darkening scarlet sea. He said, after a time, “But one day—one day that will come—when you find yourself loving as helplessly, and as certainly wrongly, as I, loving against all you know, against all you are…. remember me then.”
To this Kokinja made no response; but by and by she rose herself and stood silently beside her father, watching the first stars waken, one with each heartbeat of hers. She could not have said when she at last took his hand.
“I cannot stay,” she said. “It is a long way home, and seems longer now.”
The Shark God touched her hair lightly. “You will go back more swiftly than you arrived, I promise you that. But if you could remain with me a little time….” He left the words unfinished.
“A little time,” Kokinja agreed. “But in return….” She hesitated, and her father did not press her, but only waited for her to continue. She said presently, “I know that my mother never wished to see you in your true form, and for herself she was undoubtedly right. But I…. I am not my mother.” She had no courage to say more than that.
The Shark God did not reply for some while, and when he did his tone was deep and somber. “Even if I granted it, even if you could bear it, you could never see all of what I am. Human eyes cannot”—he struggled for the exact word—“they do not bend in the right way. It was meant as a kindness, I think, just as was the human gift of forgetfulness. You have no idea how the gods envy you that, the forgetting.”
“Even so,” Kokinja insisted. “Even so, I would not be afraid. If you do not know that by now….”
“Well, we will see,” answered the Sha
rk God, exactly as all human parents have replied to importunate children at one time or another. And with that, even Kokinja knew to content herself.
In the morning, she plunged into the waves to seek her breakfast, as did her father on the other side of the island. She never knew where he slept—or if he slept at all—but he returned in time to see her emerging from the water with a fish in her mouth and another in her hand. She tore them both to pieces, like any shark, and finished the meal before noticing him. Abashed, she said earnestly, “When I am at home, I cook my food as my mother taught me—but in the sea….”
“Your mother always cooks dinner for me,” the Shark God answered quietly. “We wait until you two are asleep, or away, and then she will come down to the water and call. It has been so from the first.”
“Then she has seen you—”
“No. I take my tribute afterward, when I leave her, and she never follows then.” The Shark God smiled and sighed at the same time, studying his daughter’s puzzled face. He said, “What is between us is hard to explain, even to you. Especially to you.”
The Shark God lifted his head to taste the morning air, which was cool and cloudless over water so still that Kokinja could hear a dolphin breathing too far away for her to see. He frowned slightly, saying, “Storm. Not now, but in three days’ time. It will be hard.”
Kokinja did not show her alarm. She said grimly, “I came here through storms. I survived those.”
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