Nathan thought, Now would be the moment to wake up—but he knew he couldn’t, the moment had gone for good, and somehow, in taking control of his thought, he had severed his link with the Grandir. This time, there was nobody to help him but himself…
The water was already three feet deep and Denaero had changed, flexing her tail with relief. Her skin was starting to plump out again, though the blotches would remain for some while.
She said: “Can you go home?”
“No—”
“Hang on to the Crown—I’ll hold you—I won’t let go, whatever happens. If the water doesn’t come in too fast we might make it to the surface …”
“Leave me. You can save yourself—” He’d always thought it idiotic when people said things like that in films. It sounded idiotic now.
Denaero ignored the objection, unlashing the leatherwrack strap that supported her knife. “Here—this’ll help.” The water was rising faster—faster—in a minute Nathan would be out of his depth. Denaero looped the weed under his arms, around his torso, through the Crown, binding them together—he felt her breasts squeezed against his back.
He told himself he wasn’t noticing, and then it occurred to him that he was probably going to die, so he might as well notice and enjoy it.
But there was no time now—he was swept off his feet in the growing surge, carried across the cave, buffeted this way and that. Even Denaero could do little except try to steady them and lift Nathan’s head above water whenever possible. Don’t panic, he thought. Panic kills. Breathe when you can … He was weakened by the long swim—the trek across the cavern—lack of food—lack of drink. They were getting nearer and nearer to the roof, most of which was still holding. The cracks were all at the western end where the walls must be thinnest; Nathan, who had a good sense of direction, was almost sure it was the west. Nefanu, speaking now in the tongue of magic, sealed one rent, only for another to open wider.
“We must go—that way!” Denaero gasped, pushing against the current. “We need—out—”
The new rent yawned farther, farther—there was the head-splitting, mind-crunching noise of great rocks shifting and grinding, as if some ancient door in the fabric of the planet itself was slowly opening. The sea should have come through in a boiling tumult that would sweep them all to destruction—but there was something else in the gap, blocking it out, restricting the flow to a mere gush. Nathan and the mermaid were lifted up on the crest of the wash, plunged down again into a sudden valley of water. Briefly, they glimpsed a darkness filling the gap—a darkness solid as a wall, blacker than the blackest deeps of the sea. And in the darkness, eyes—not in pairs but singly, hundreds, maybe thousands, all different. Werefolk eyes, reptile eyes, human eyes…
My God, thought Nathan. What did we summon?
There was a smell—a stench—as if all the fish in the sea had been piled on a beach to rot. Nathan gagged, filling his mouth with water.
He heard Denaero say something that might have been Leviathan, but the sea swallowed her cry.
They never saw it clearly. That one glimpse—Nefanu’s scream, searing air and water alike—a gulping, squelching, gurgling noise as if a giant quicksand had reared up, consumed a city, and was now smacking its muddy lips. Even as the thing retreated the backwash bore them toward it—Denaero, threshing her tail like a fury, propelled them into its wake like a flier heading for the epicenter of a hurricane. Nathan took his last breath even as they dived and the ocean poured over them …
A LIFETIME later, they broke the surface. Nathan coughed and retched a little and, against all the odds, found he was still alive. They had emerged from so near the cavern roof, he realized, they must have been above the levels of killing pressure. He had a dim recollection of the sea swirl rushing past, and the opening looming up in the cavern wall, and torn rock on either side, and the black solid mass beyond. He couldn’t tell if it had scales or skin, only that it seemed somehow rubbery—he had a horror of rubberiness ever after—and the smell of it, the rotting fishy stink, tainting the water. It was too vast to see any shape. There had been an eye, flat and round like the eye of a haddock, but lidded … An eye so near he could have touched it. And then only the sea.
Denaero said: “Has it gone? I think it’s gone … I knew it would shield us, when the sea came in. It was so big … I knew, if we could get close enough …”
Nathan couldn’t talk.
“It was the Leviathan, wasn’t it? It ate her … It ate her.”
Something zoomed past underwater, grazing Nathan’s calf. He managed a grunt of pain.
“What’s that?” Denaero said.
Deflected by Nathan’s leg, the javelin came to the surface some way off.
They were in the middle of a war.
bove the sea, nothing looked different. Nathan’s first thought was that his plan had failed: in spite of Nefanu’s death and the leakage into the caverns, it would take too long for them to fill and the level of the ocean to fall. After all, it covered the whole planet, so a huge volume of water would have to move before it sank even a foot. From what the Goddess had said, the final drop would be considerable, but Nathan remembered learning in a geology lesson that when the Mediterranean was sealed off and dried out it took a year to refill, and he could imagine the labyrinth of caves might take at least that long. I should have thought of that, he berated himself. I’ve changed their world for nothing. They’re still killing each other …
Most of the battle was clearly happening underwater, but the surface of the sea churned from the tumult below—the waves still heaved from the backwash of the Leviathan’s rising—bodies floated here and there, both selkie and merman. The shadow of the birds stretched across the reef from sky to sky, blotting out the sun. They screamed and swooped and dived, mobbing any merfolk who emerged above water—the noise of them was like the screech of a hundred saws sawing at a hundred metal bars. If Nathan and Denaero had been any closer, it would have been unbearable. Nathan realized how conspicuous they were with their heads bobbing about like marker buoys. “Undo the strap!” he said to Denaero, but she was already working on it. Even as he spoke, a group of gannets detached themselves from the flock and began streaking toward them.
“Ezroc!” he cried, hoping the albatross was within earshot. “Ezroc!”
And then he was there, plunging down from some hover point far above, fending off the assault with a squawk of warning. “Leave them! Leave them to me!” Denaero had unfastened the leatherwrack that bound them together, and as Ezroc settled on the water Nathan hung on to his neck.
“We have to stop this,” he gasped. “Nefanu’s dead—”
“What?”
“Didn’t you hear the horn?” said Denaero.
“We heard something—there was this enormous surge, like the beginning of a tidal wave—the armies got mixed up—then it subsided and the fighting started again …”
“We raised the Leviathan,” Denaero said, not without pride. “It ate the Goddess. It just swallowed her up—”
“The Leviathan?” The bird’s head swiveled, trying to look in every direction at once. “Where? Where?”
“It’s gone,” Denaero assured him. “It ate her and vanished.”
“What did it look like?”
“I don’t know. It was too big to see …”
“Get on my back,” Ezroc said to Nathan, pulling himself together. “We’ll find Nokosha.” And to Denaero: “You get hold of your father. I saw him over that way …”
“He thinks I’m dead!”
“Give him a nice surprise!”
Nathan climbed onto the albatross, the Crown once more looped around his arm, feeling weak from long effort, clumsy with exhaustion. He needed an adrenaline rush, but so far his body hadn’t responded to the order. Denaero, revived by extended immersion, had evidently recovered her strength: she shouted something and dived.
Ezroc took off, calling to the birds in their own languages—in Gannet, and Skua, and Common G
ull. Gradually, the flock ceased their attack and rose into the air, spreading out in a giant V-formation behind him, a cloud of wings that swept across the ocean like a great wind, whipping the waves to spume. They no longer screamed but cried the death of Nefanu in all the tongues of the sea. For Nathan, the adrenaline kicked in at last—he forgot he was tired, he forgot he was thirsty—now he was king of the sky, riding at the head of his own storm.
“Nokosha!” Ezroc shrieked. “No-ko-sha!”
The spotted selkie emerged from the water, gazing upward with eyes glinting like the Great Ice. There was a long cut on his cheekbone; blood curled around him. A body heaved to the surface close by.
“I’m busy.”
“Nefanu’s dead!” Ezroc cried. “The Queen of the Sea is gone! There’s no more need to fight—”
“Tell that to the merfolk!” Nokosha snarled. “When they stop trying to kill me, I’ll stop killing them.”
He disappeared, and the albatross wheeled low over the water, calling and calling in vain. For the first time Nathan could see something of the battle below—a phalanx of sharkriders with a leader who might have been Uraki on the great white, and around them selkies darting and diving, zooming in, falling back, more agile but less well armed, less strong than their mounted opponents. Manta rays surged up from the deep; walruses charged to cut them off—battle cruisers blocking submarine planes. Thin lines of javelins streaked the blue; blades gleamed in a searching sunray. Around the edge of the conflict, a scouting icthauryon snapped its jaws on a corpse, snatching an easy meal. Nathan saw Nokosha, spots visible even underwater, rallying a band of selkies to ambush the sharkriders, and suddenly the future was very clear. He and Uraki would fight—would fight and kill each other—out of some warped mutual respect—when they might have been allies, they might have been friends …
“We must stop them,” Nathan reiterated, but there was nothing he could do.
They were too human to turn aside from war …
It was a moment before he noticed that the cry of the birds had changed. He looked around, uncomprehending, and thought for an instant the Leviathan had returned, because the approaching shapes were so big—as big as the biggest ships in our world. Blue-black bodies rising and falling in an inexorable advance, shattering the waves into foam clouds; vast tails lifting and thumping down on the water; blowholes spurting geysers of spray. There were twenty—fifty—a hundred of them, not a pod but a fleet, shouldering aside the scavenging icthauryon as if they were minnows. The horn had called them with their own music, and their song rolled beneath the sea like the boom of giant tubas and bassoons, and the battle parted before them, and warriors released their weapons to cover their ears from the din of it.
Nathan took up the birds’ cry, calling till his voice was hoarse: “The whales are coming! The whales are coming!” and there were tears in his eyes though he couldn’t spare the moisture, because he knew now they could stop the war after all…
THERE IS a sort of tradition that it always rains after battles, as if the heavens themselves are weeping for the dead. In a world of sea this has very little effect on anyone, since its inhabitants neither drink nor cry, but Nathan stretched out his hands to the squall and sucked the fresh water thirstily from fingers and palm. They were talking above water, a concession on the part of the merfolk—and an acknowledgment that their world was changing. The Dragon’s Reef had always been near the surface, but now Nathan could stand on the rock with his head and shoulders exposed.
“These were the islands,” he explained to Ezroc. “The islands you and Keerye searched for.”
“The coral will die,” Denaero said, remembering Nefanu’s words in the cave.
“Yes, but more will grow as the lower rock stratum is brought nearer the sun. I think your father’s halls should still be deep enough to remain covered. And the level will change gradually, over several seasons. The smallfish and other reef dwellers will have plenty of time to move. It won’t be easy but when it’s over there will be land again. You can learn to walk.”
“Merfolk were not meant to walk,” Rhadamu said. The shock of finding his daughter alive, while clearly pleasant, had shaken his regal authority; he was making an effort to reassert himself.
“Then why do you change?”
“For mating.”
“Well,” Nathan said, “the islands here will be yours. It would be a waste not to make use of them. But it’s up to you. You’ve worshipped a psychotic goddess for centuries. Now that she’s gone, you can make up your own minds.”
“We will have no more war,” Rhadamu declared heavily. “If the king of the selkies agrees—”
“I am not the king,” Nokosha interrupted. “We don’t have kings. I became the leader when my people needed one, but now …”
“Folk still need a spokesman,” Burgoss grunted, wallowing in the water nearby. Like many of the northerners, he was uncomfortably warm. “Easy to lead us into a fight, harder to lead us out of it.”
“We will make a treaty,” Rhadamu ordained, seizing the initiative. “You will stay in your seas, we in ours. We will call it the Dragon’s Accord.”
“Perhaps we could fight sometimes without killing,” Uraki suggested, plainly missing his aborted combat with Nokosha. “For practice.”
He was sitting on Raagu, who regularly lashed from side to side, clashing his jaws on the rusted metal bit. It was not conducive to a climate of negotiation.
“In my world,” Nathan said, “we call that sport. We have these games we play, one country against another, like soccer and cricket.”
Nokosha sneered: “Games!”
“There’s a lot of skill involved,” Nathan said. “Of course, if you feel it’s beyond you …”
“Don’t try to manipulate me!”
“Describe this sport,” said Uraki.
Nathan did his best to explain the principles of soccer—cricket, he felt, would be too complicated—and indeed, a few seasons later, a game of waterball developed in that world that became so popular, it was almost responsible for starting another war instead of becoming a substitute for one.
Meanwhile …
“What will happen to the shamans?” Denaero asked.
“Without the Goddess,” Rhadamu said, “they have no voice, no basis for their authority. We will dispense with their services. Where they go, and what they do, is a matter for them.”
“Won’t they be punished?” Denaero said wistfully.
“For what?” her father said. “They served Nefanu, as did we all. Anyhow, there has been enough punishment. I do not punish you for surviving, nor will I punish them for losing the whole reason for their existence. Let them be. You have life; they, a living death. It will suffice.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Denaero allowed herself to be persuaded.
“How will we cement this accord of yours?” Nokosha asked the king.
“We will engrave it on the first rock to emerge from the sea,” Rhadamu decided. “We will cut the letters deep with ancient tools, and we will see to it that no weather erodes them, nor any weed grows over them, so they will last for a thousand years.”
“We do not have this skill,” said Nokosha, evidently intrigued. “What will you engrave?”
“A merman and a selkie, hands linked in a gesture of peace. Furthermore … among my people it is customary to seal an alliance or detente with a marriage. Of course, between hotbloods and coldkin this is not possible—a selkie and a mermaid could not breed—but it might be desirable for them to bond. Some kind of official arrangement. I have many daughters. I would be prepared to offer you one, in token of our trust.”
“Th-thank you,” said Nokosha, for once at a loss.
“Miyara might perhaps be suitable. She was promised to a fellow king, but that allegiance is no longer necessary. She is considered the loveliest of her sisters.”
Somewhere below the water there was a screech of vexation and fury.
“We don’t do things that way in
the north,” Nokosha said, recovering himself. “However, were I interested in such a connection, I would not aspire to too much beauty. I am hardly a pearl among my kind. I would prefer the boldest of your children, rather than the fairest. Your daughter Denaero—”
“What?” It was Denaero’s turn to shriek. “Marryyou? I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—”
“You will do as you are told,” snapped Rhadamu.
“In my world,” Nathan said—words the others were already beginning to consider ominous—“we treat women as equals. We don’t tell them who to marry, or what to do.”
“I like your world”—from Denaero.
“You cannot do such a thing,” Uraki said, appalled. “The female of the species is always weaker. It is the part of the strong male to protect and guide her.”
“We think intelligence is more important than brute strength,” Nathan said.
He drew back, leaving them to their arguing; there’s nothing like a peace treaty for causing a really good argument. Now, he knew, it was time to go home—if he could find the way. It wasn’t going to happen anymore by some magical stroke of good—or bad—timing; he had taken control, and that meant he had to open the portal himself. At Bartlemy’s suggestion he had always kept the mark of Agares, the Rune of Finding, written on his arm in indelible ink. It might help a little. He wanted to say proper goodbyes, especially to Denaero: they had been through so much together. But she was taking the first steps—or swimming the first strokes—toward sexual equality, and he thought it was best to let her get on with it. He found the albatross beside him, and although the bird had no obvious expression he knew Ezroc understood.
“I have to go,” Nathan said. “If I can. I’ve been here too long …”
The Poisoned Crown Page 31