The Changeling Sea

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  Around its neck, like a dog collar, was a massive chain of pure gold.

  Three

  PERI STAYED WITH HER MOTHER that night. The sea, she decided, annoyed at her constant harassment, had sent some great monster out of its depths to eat her. Her mother didn’t ask why she was there, but Peri’s presence seemed to tug at her thoughts. She watched Peri. Sometimes a question trembled in her eyes; she seemed about to speak. But Peri would look away. Though sea-dragons garlanded with gold rode the waves in Peri’s mind, she clamped the secret behind her lips, like an oyster locking away its pearl, rather than admit her mother might be right: There might be a land of light and shadow hidden among the slowly swaying kelp beneath the waves.

  And Kir. His face rose clearly in her thoughts just before she fell asleep, pale and dark and restless against the vast wild blue of the sea. What message had he sent? she wondered in her dreams. And to whom?

  The lovely promises of spring were nothing but dreams themselves by morning: The spring rains had started. Peri, walking soggily to the inn, felt all her fears of the sea-dragon dwindle under the dreary sky. Nothing alive in the world could have been as big as she remembered it. The gold around its neck could not have been real. And if it had wanted to eat her, it could have plucked her like an anemone away from the rock, the way she’d stood there frozen. Besides, she remembered, cheering up, it had no teeth. Only tiny shrimp and bits of kelp could pass through the strainer in its jaws; it was destined to a life of broth. It had simply been some great sea creature coming up for air as it passed along the island. It was probably scaring ships in the South Isles by now.

  But who had put the chain around its neck?

  She thought about that as she swept the stairs and made beds and carried buckets of ash to the bins behind the kitchen. Everyone was grumpy because of the rain. The guests tracked paths of water and mud on the floors and complained of smoking chimneys. Some of the fishers came in early off the heavy, swollen sea and trailed in more water, more sand. By the day’s end, Peri felt as scoured as the flagstones and as damp. Carey burst into tears.

  “My hands,” she wailed. “I might as well be an old lobster.”

  “Never mind,” Mare sighed. “Maybe you’ll find some rich old lobster to love you.”

  “I won’t! Ever! I’ll never get out of this town. I’ll never get out of this inn! I’ll be scrubbing floors here when I’m ninety years old, and cleaning hearths and making beds to my dying day. The only pearls I’ll ever see will be on someone else’s fingers, I’ll never wear velvet, I’ll never sleep in lace, I’ll never—”

  “Oh, please, Carey. I’ve got a headache as it is.”

  “I’ll never—”

  “You’ll never guess—” said Mare’s lover, Enin, sticking his head into the doorway of the back room where they hung their aprons and stored their mops. Then he saw Carey’s tears and ducked back nervously. “Oh.”

  “Enin!” Mare called. He was running water, too, from his rain cloak; his boat had just got in. Peri dumped her mop and her brush into her empty bucket and shoved it against the wall. She put her hands to her tailbone and bent backward, stretching. Enin’s face reappeared. It was softly bearded, sunburned, and speckled with rain. His eyes, light blue, looked round as coins. Carey banged her brush into her bucket crossly, still sniffing. Enin’s eyes went to her cautiously. Mare said, beginning to smile, since Enin’s face was the most cheerful thing they had seen all day, “I’ll never guess what?”

  “You’ll never guess what’s out there in the sea.”

  “Mermaids in a coracle, I suppose.”

  “No.” He shook his head, groping for words. “No. It’s—”

  “A sea monster?”

  “Yes!” Peri’s mop slipped as she stood staring at him. It rapped her on the head and Enin winced. “Are you all right there, girl? Mare, it’s huge! Big as this inn! It came right up to our boats—mine and Tull Olney’s—we went farthest out—and watched us fish!”

  “Oh, Enin,” Mare said, touching her forehead.

  “Red as fire, even in the mist and rain, we could see that. And you’ll never guess what else.”

  “It has a chain of gold around its neck,” Peri said.

  “It’s wearing a chain of gold—pure gold—Mare, I swear! Stop laughing and listen!” Then he stopped talking, and Mare stopped laughing, and Carey stopped snuffling. They all stared at Peri.

  “I saw it,” she said, awkward in the sudden silence. “I saw it. Yesterday. Beyond the spires. The gold hurt my eyes.”

  Carey’s long, slow breath sounded like the outgoing tide. “Gold.”

  “But what is it?” Mare said, bewildered. “Some great fish? A sea lion with a pattern around its neck?”

  “No, no, bigger. Much bigger. More like a—a dragon, yes, that’s what it’s more like. And the gold is—Ah, Mare, you wouldn’t believe—”

  “You’re right, I wouldn’t.” Mare sighed. “Probably some poor lost sea-something with a king’s gilded anchor chain caught around its neck.”

  “No.”

  “No,” Peri echoed him. “It’s real. I saw the sun pouring off it like—like melting butter.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Carey demanded.

  “Because it scared me,” she said irritably. “All chained like that. Like someone’s pet. I didn’t want to think who might have made that chain. The links are so big I could have crawled through one.”

  There was a silence. Carey said suddenly to Enin, “Come in and shut the door.”

  Her voice was so high and sharp he did it. The noise from the inn faded.

  “Why?” he said, puzzled.

  “Because it’s ours,” she said fiercely. “Our gold. It belongs to us, to the village. Not to the king, not to the summer guests. To us. We have to find a way to get it.”

  Enin stared at her, breathing out of his mouth. Mare pushed her hands against her eyes.

  “Oh, Carey.”

  “She’s right, though,” Enin said slowly. “She’s right.”

  “It must be our secret,” Carey insisted.

  “Yes.”

  Mare turned abruptly, picked her cloak off a peg, and tossed it over her shoulders so fast it billowed like a sail. “I think,” she said tautly, “you’d better take another look at this sea-dragon before you start counting your gold pieces. I think—”

  “Mare—”

  “I think you and Tull had too many beers for breakfast and you rowed right into the place where the sky touches the sea and you hear singing in the mist, and sea cows turn into mermaids, and old ships full of ghosts sail by without a sound. That’s where you’ve been. Sea-dragons. Gold chains.” She jerked the door open. “I have a headache and I’m famished. The only gold I want to see is in a cold glass of beer.”

  “But, Mare,” Enin said, following her out. Carey gazed at Peri, her eyes suddenly wistful.

  “Was that it? A sea-dream?”

  Peri dragged a hand through her hair. “I didn’t have any beer for breakfast when I saw it,” she sighed. “I don’t know what it is. But it’s not our gold. I wouldn’t like to be caught stealing from whoever made that chain.”

  Carey was silent; they both were, envisioning gold, so much gold that the damp air seemed to brighten around them. Carey reached for her cloak. “Nonsense,” she said briskly. “Anyone who could waste that much gold on a chain for a sea-pet would never know it was missing.”

  Peri kept an eye out for the sea-pet when she walked back to the old woman’s house. But there was no fire in the gray world, no gold, only the sea heaving sullenly between the spires. The rain clouds hiding the setting sun did not release a single thread of light. A false light dragged Peri’s eyes from the sea: the gorse blazing gold above the old woman’s house. And in front of her house: a black horse.

  The rider, apparently, was inside. Peri’s brows went up as high as they could go. As she trudged from the tide line across the stretch of beach toward the house, she saw that the top half of t
he door was open. Kir leaned against the bottom half, watching the breakers so intently that he did not notice Peri until she was nearly on the doorstep.

  His head turned, his eyes still full of the sea. His thoughts tumbled over Peri like a wave, drenching her with a sharp, wild sense of restlessness and despair. She stopped short, one foot on the doorstep, staring at him. But he had already moved to open the door, while something shut itself away behind his face.

  He didn’t speak. Peri dumped scallops the innkeeper had given her out of her cloak and hung it up. He had started a fire, she noticed in surprise. He had picked up driftwood with his royal hands and piled it into the grate. But, it appeared, he did not know what a scallop was.

  “What’s this?” He was fingering a fan-shaped shell.

  “My supper,” Peri said, huddling close to the fire. He watched her shake water out of her hair. She added gruffly, recalling some manners, “You’re welcome to stay.”

  He turned edgily away from the shells. “You cook, too.”

  “I have to eat,” she said simply. He paced to the door and back again to the hearth, where she crouched, combing her hair with her fingers.

  “Did you give my message to the sea?” he asked abruptly. She nodded, opening her mouth, but he had turned away again, speaking bitterly before she could answer. “I’m being stupid. It’s just a child’s game, your hexes, my message. They’re probably lying out there now among the litter on the tide line. You can’t talk to the sea by throwing things at it.”

  Peri, trying so hard to understand him that her forehead creased and her eyes were round as owls’ eyes, asked bewilderedly, “Why did you want the sea to have your father’s ring?”

  “Why do you think?” he answered sharply.

  “I don’t know.” She felt stupid herself. Something in her voice made him look at her again, as if he had never really seen her since she walked in damp and untidy from the rain, with red, chapped hands and tired eyes. His expression changed. Peri, recognizing his unhappiness if nothing else, said helplessly, “I don’t know if the sea got your message. But after I threw it in, the biggest sea-thing I have ever seen in the world lifted its head out of the water to look at me. Around its neck there was a chain of gold—”

  “What?”

  “A chain. Gold. It—”

  “Are you,” he asked, his voice so thin and icy she shifted nearer to the fire, “making a fool of me?”

  Peri shook her head, remembering the flame-colored wall rising out of the sea, blocking the sun, and the molten reflection of gold everywhere. “It was like a dragon. But with fins and long ribbons of streamers instead of wings. It was bigger than this house, and the gold chain ran down into the deep sea as if—as if it began there, at the bottom.”

  The prince’s pale face seemed to glisten in the firelight like mother-of-pearl. He whirled; rain and wind blew across the threshold as he flung open the door. The waves fell in long, weary sighs against the sand. He stood silently, his eyes on the empty sea between the spires. Peri, her clothes still damp, began to shiver.

  She moved finally to stop the shivering. She poured water from a bucket into a pot, dropped the scallops into it to steam them open. She hung the pot above the fire, then knelt to add more driftwood to the flames. Kir shut the door finally. He came to the hearth, stood close to Peri. Behind him he had left a trail of wet footprints.

  Her eyes were drawn to them; her hands slowed. She heard Kir whisper, “All that gold to keep a sea-thing chained to the bottom of the sea.”

  “Why—” Her voice caught. “Why would—Who would—”

  “There must be a way. There must be.” He was still whispering. His hands were clenched. She stared up at him.

  “To do what?”

  “To get there.”

  “Where?” She rose, as he flung his wet cloak back over his shoulders. “Where are you going?”

  “To the land beneath the sea.”

  “Now?”

  “Not now,” he said impatiently. “Now, I’m just going.”

  “Don’t you want supper?”

  He shook his head, his attention already ebbing away from her, caught in the evening tide. She scratched her head with a spoon, her face puckered anxiously. “Will you be back?” she asked suddenly. He looked at her from a long distance, farther than sleep, farther, it seemed, than from where the tide began.

  “From where?”

  She swallowed, feeling her face redden. “Here,” she said gruffly. “Will you come back here?”

  “Oh,” he said, surprisedly. “Of course.”

  The door closed. She heard his horse nicker, then heard its hoofbeats, riding away from the village, down the long beach into the gathering night. She gazed at the door, envisioning Kir, dark and wet as the night he rode into, restless as the crying gulls and sea winds, with a hint of foam in the color of his skin. A frown crept into her eyes. Her foot tapped on the floor, on one of his footprints. He had left water everywhere, it seemed. Then her foot stilled; her breath stilled. She glimpsed something as elusive as a spangle of moonlight on the water. A lock of his father’s hair thrown to the sea, a pearl…a message…

  She blinked, shaking her head until the odd thoughts and images jumbled senselessly, harmlessly. She grabbed the broom, swept at his watery footsteps across her threshold, at her hearth; they blurred and finally faded.

  Four

  THE RAIN WITHDREW, crouched at the horizon; the fishers had a spell of blue sky to tempt them out, and then a wind and a rain-pocked sea to drive them back into the harbor. Out, in, out, in—it was like that for several days. Tales of the sea-dragon became as common as oysters. Then the teasing weather gave way to a full-blown storm that piled surf on the beach and tossed boats loose from the docks. The fishers could not get out past the swells raging at the harbor mouth. The sea-dragon rode out the storm alone. The fishers congregated at the inn to drink beer and stare moodily out at the weather. The guests, disdainful of the smells of wet wool and brine, withdrew to a private room, leaving the hearth and the flowing tap to the villagers. Peri, passing in the hall with her arms full of linen, or coming in to tend the fire, was aware, without really listening, of the thread of gold, glittering and magical, that wove in and out of their conversation.

  “Links of gold. A link has to have an opening point, otherwise how would you make a chain? So we’ll get a big lever of some kind, force a link apart—”

  “And what’s the monster going to be doing while you’re standing on its neck and sticking a lever through its chain? Nibbling shrimp and watching gulls? It’ll dive, man, and take you right down with it.”

  “Fire, then. Fire melts gold. We’ll build a floating forge, row it out underneath the chain where it meets the sea. We’ll distract the sea-monster with fish or whatever it eats—”

  “Shrimp. Brine shrimp. How can you distract something as big as a barn with something you can hardly see yourself?”

  “Then we’ll sing to it. It likes singing.”

  “Sing!”

  “Or Tull can play his fiddle. It’ll be listening; we’ll float the forge behind it, melt a link through, and then…”

  “Gold,” Mare sighed, mopping up the perpetual river of sand and water in the hall. “That’s all they talk about these days. Even Ami and Bel. Enin’s the worst. It’s making them all loony.”

  “If it’s out there,” Carey said sharply, “they should get it. It’s not doing the monster any good.”

  “Yes, but they’re not thinking. None of them are. Nothing human could make a chain like that. That’s what they should be considering first. Instead”—she gave her mop a worried, impatient shove—“they’re going to do something stupid. I know it.”

  “The thing is,” the fishers said, while the wind blustered and threatened at the closed windows, “there’s still another problem. Even if we do pry open a link, what’s the good of that? How could we possibly keep the chain from sliding back down to the bottom of the sea? It’d be like taking a wh
ale into our boats. It’d crush us if we tried to hold it.”

  “Then we’ll cut a link farther down. We’ll kill the monster and let the sea itself float it to shore.”

  “Kill it! If we injure it at all, it’ll just disappear on us. Or worse, come back and swamp our boats for us.”

  “Then how? How do we get the gold?”

  Carey took to lingering in the doorway, listening. Peri was tempted to do the same. The fiery sea-dragon with its gold chain provided the only color in a world where everything—sand, sea, sky—had faded gray in the rain. It seemed a wonderful tale for a bleak, idle day, an elaborate fish story to tell over beer beside a warm hearth.

  But Mare, bringing clean glasses into the bar, said crossly, “That’s like you, all of you, to think of killing when you think of gold.”

  Enin said uncomfortably, “Now, Mare, we’re just talking, let us be. It’s the most we can do on a day like this.”

  “But you’re not thinking!”

  “Well,” Ami said good-humoredly, “nobody pays us for that.”

  “Have you ever met a man or woman who could make a chain like that? Suppose whoever made that chain has something to say about your stealing that gold? Or freeing the sea-monster?”

  “Oh, it’s probably ancient, Mare, it’s probably—”

  “Oh, ho, then why is it so shiny it’s left its reflection in all your greedy eyes? I haven’t heard of so much as a barnacle on it, or a bit of moss. I think you should be a bit careful about who might treat a sea-monster that size like a pet. That’s what I think, and there’s no need to pay me for it.”

  They still talked, for the winds whipped up foam like the froth on cream on the surface of the sea, and the cold rain blew in sheets. But Mare had veered them away from the sea-dragon, Peri noticed. Now it was not “how?” but “who?” and no longer sea-monsters, but enchanted lands and witchery.