The Changeling Sea

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Who are you?”

  “Peri.” She was so surprised that her voice nearly jumped out of her.

  “Periwinkle? Like the flower?” he asked.

  “Is there a flower?” His eyes kept making her want to look at them, put a color to them. But they eluded definition.

  “Oh, yes,” the stranger said. “A lovely blue flower.”

  “I thought they were only snails.”

  “Why,” the stranger asked gravely, “would you be named after a snail?”

  “Because I didn’t know there were flowers,” Peri said fuzzily.

  “I see.” His voice was at once deep and light, with none of the lilt of the coastal towns in it. He regarded her curiously, oblivious to the water seeping into his clothes. His body looked thin but muscular, his hands lean and strong, oddly capable, as if they could as easily tie a mooring knot as a bow in a ribbon. He was dressed very simply, but not like a fisher, not like a farmer, not like one of the king’s followers, either, for his leather was scuffed and the fine wool cloak that had threatened to sail away with him on the wind was threaded with grass stains. He popped a soap bubble with one forefinger and added, “I heard a rumor that someone here needs a magician.”

  She nodded wearily, remembering the tattered fortune-tellers, the alchemists in their colorful, bedraggled robes. Then she drew a sudden breath, gazing again into the stranger’s eyes. That, she felt, must explain their changing, the suggestion in them that they had witnessed other countries, marvels. He looked back at her without blinking. As she bent closer, searching for the marvels, a door opened somewhere at the far side of the world.

  “Peri!”

  She jumped. The stranger sighed, got slowly to his feet. He stood dripping under the amazed stare of the innkeeper.

  “Good morning,” he said. “I’m—”

  “You’re all wet!”

  “I’m all wet. Yes.” He ran a hand down his damp clothes, and the dripping stopped. The flagstones were suddenly dry, too. So was the puddle outside the door. “My name is Lyo. I’m a—”

  “Yes,” the innkeeper said. He bustled forward, clutched the magician’s arm as if he might vanish like Peri’s scrub water. “Yes. Indeed you are. Come this way, sir. Peri, go down to the kitchen and bring the gentleman some breakfast.”

  “I’m not hungry,” said the magician.

  “A beer?”

  “No,” the magician said inflexibly. “Just Peri.” He added, at the innkeeper’s silence, “I’ll see that her work gets done.”

  “That may well be,” the innkeeper said with sudden grimness. “But she’s a good, innocent girl, and we’ve promised to pay you in gold and not in Periwinkles.”

  Peri shut her eyes tightly, wishing a flagstone would rise under her feet and carry her away. Then she heard Lyo’s laugh, and saw the flush that had risen under his brown skin.

  He held out his hands to the innkeeper; his wrists were bound together by a chain of gold. “I only want her to take me to see the sea-dragon.”

  The innkeeper swallowed, staring at the gold. The chain became a gold coin in the magician’s palm. “I’ll need a room.”

  “Yes, your lordship. Anything else? Anything at all.”

  “A boat.”

  “There’s the Sea Urchin,” Peri said dazedly. “But it needs oars.”

  The odd eyes glinted at her again, smiling, curious. “Why would a Sea Urchin not have oars?”

  “It lost them when my father drowned.”

  He was silent a moment; he seemed to be listening to things she had not said. He touched her gently, led her outside. “Oars it shall have.” She was still clutching her brush. He took it from her, turned it into a small blue flower. “This,” he said, giving it back to her, “is a periwinkle.”

  The magician borrowed oars from no discernible place, stripped the barnacles from the Sea Urchin’s bottom with his hand, put his ear to its side to listen for leaks, and pronounced it seaworthy. He rowed easily out of the harbor into open sea, his lank hair curling in the spray, his face burning darker in the sunlight. A pair of seals leaped in graceful arches in and out of the swells; seabirds the color of foam circled the blue above their heads. The magician hailed the seals cheerfully, whistled to the birds, and stopped rowing completely once to let a jellyfish drift past the bow. He seemed delighted by the sea life, as if he had seen little of it, yet he rowed fearlessly farther than Peri had ever gone, out to where the very surface of the world was fluid and dangerous, where the sea was the ruling kingdom they trespassed upon in their tiny, fragile boats, and the life and beauty in it lay far beneath them, in places forbidden to their eyes.

  Peri’s thoughts drifted to Kir, another sea secret. She had made him a promise: to help him find his way out of the world, away from her. But where was the bridge between land and water, between air and the undersea? She pulled her thoughts about her like a cloak, sat huddled among them, stirring out of them finally to see the magician’s eyes, now as bottle-green as the water, on her face.

  She shifted, disconcerted, as if he could pick thoughts like flowers out of her head. But he only asked worriedly, “What is it? Don’t you like the sea?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked you to come with me.”

  “It’s not that,” she said. “I don’t mind being on it like this. I don’t like what’s under—” She stopped abruptly; he finished for her.

  “What’s under the sea.” He sounded surprised. “What is under the sea besides kelp and whales and periwinkles?”

  “Nothing,” she mumbled, frightened suddenly at the thought of telling a sea tale that was as yet barely more than a secret in a king’s heart.

  “Then what are you—” He stopped himself, then, letting go of the oars to ruffle at his hair. The oars, upended, hung patiently in the air. “I see. It’s a secret.”

  She nodded, staring at the oars. “Are you—are you rowing by magic?”

  He looked affronted, while the Sea Urchin’s bow skewed around toward land and the oars looked as if they were dipped in air. She laughed; the magician smiled again, pleased. He gripped the oars, brought them back down. “No, Periwinkle, I’m not rowing by magic, though my back and my shoulders and my hands are all shouting at me to get out and walk—”

  “Can you do that?” she breathed. “Walk on the sea?”

  “If I could, would I be blistering my hands with these oars? Besides, walking on the sea is very peculiar business, I’ve heard. You walk out of time, you walk out of the world, you find yourself in strange countries, where words and sentences grow solid, underwater, like the branches of coral, and you can read coral colonies the way, on land, you can read history.” He laughed at her expression.

  “Is it true?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

  “Where?”

  “To the country beneath the sea.” He was silent, then, watching her, his eyes oddly somber. “Why,” he asked slowly, “do you want to know about that country?”

  She almost told him, for if he knew it, he might know the path to it. But it was not her secret, it was Kir’s. “I don’t,” she said brusquely. He only nodded, accepting that, if not, she sensed, believing it, and she had to resist the urge to tell him all over again.

  “I can row awhile,” she said instead. “I have strong arms.” She changed places with him, took the oars. The Sea Urchin skimmed easily over the first sluggish, heaving swell she dipped the oars into; surprised, she pulled at them again and felt she was rowing in a duck pond. Lyo had put a little magic into the oars, she realized, to help her, and he had not told her. And he had turned a snail into a flower.

  He could break that chain.

  “How did you get to be a magician?” she asked curiously. “Were you born that way? With your eyes already full of magic?”

  He smiled, his eyes, facing the sun, full of light. “Magic is like night, when you first encounter it.”

  “Night?” she sai
d doubtfully. She skipped a beat with one oar and the Sea Urchin spun a half-circle.

  “A vast black full of shapes…” He trailed his fingers overboard and the Sea Urchin turned its bow toward the horizon again. “Slowly you learn to turn the dark into shapes, colors…It’s like a second dawn breaking over the world. You see something most people can’t see and yet it seems clear as the nose on your face. That there’s nothing in the world that doesn’t possess its share of magic. Even an empty shell, a lump of lead, an old dead leaf—you look at them and learn to see, and then to use, and after a while you can’t remember ever seeing the world any other way. Everything connects to something else. Like that gold chain connecting air and water. Where does it really begin? Above the sea? Below the sea? Who knows, at this point? When we find out, we’ll never be able to look at the sea the same way again. Do you understand any of my babbling?”

  Peri nodded. Then she shook her head. Then she flushed, thinking of the tipsy webs of black thread and twigs she had thrown into the sea. How could she have thought they held any power of magic? There was no more magic in her than in a broom. “Where?” she asked gruffly. “Where did you learn?” The magician’s eyes were curious again, as if they were searching for those childish hexes in her head.

  He opened his mouth to answer, and then didn’t. His eyes had moved from her to a point over her shoulder; his hands moved, gripped the sides of the boat. His face had gone very still. She knew then what he was seeing. She pulled the oars out of the water into the boat, and turned.

  The magician stood up. He balanced easily in the boat, under the great fiery stare of the sea-dragon. They were still a quarter of a mile from the fishing boats, but it had come to greet them, it seemed, lifting its bright barnacled head out of the water. Its body wavered beneath the surface of the water like a shifting flame.

  Lyo whistled. The sea-dragon’s brow fins twitched at the noise, “lgnus Dracus,” the magician murmured. “The fire-dragon of the Southern Sea. It appears to be lost. No…” He was silent again, frowning. The fire-dragon watched him. The chain around its neck was blinding in the noon light.

  The magician sat down again slowly. His face was an unusual color, probably, Peri thought, from the gold; everything around them was awash with gold. The fishers were hauling in their nets. They knew the Sea Urchin, and they knew that only something momentous would send Peri that far out in it.

  Peri felt a sudden surge of excitement at the imminence of magic. “Can you break that chain?”

  He looked at her without seeing her. “The chain,” he said finally. “Oh, yes. The chain is simple.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s just—” He waved a hand, oddly inarticulate. “There are just a couple of—Did anyone ever think to ask where this chain begins? Who made it and why?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  She shrugged, avoiding his eye. “They want the gold.”

  “The king? Did he see it?”

  Peri stared at him. He was troubled; the colors in his eyes shifted darkly. Kir, she thought, and as she tried to hide the thought, his words came back to her: The chain begins in my father’s heart. But his secret was not hers to give away. “No,” she said briefly. His face stilled again; he watched her. How did he know? she wondered, rowing a little to keep the Sea Urchin from drifting. How did he know to ask that?

  “Peri,” he said softly. “Sometimes two great kingdoms that should exist in different times, on different planes, become entangled with one another. Tales begin there. Songs are sung, names remembered…This is not the first time.”

  She looked away from the magician again, letting the wind blow her hair across her face, hide her from his magic eyes. Kir, his blood trying to ebb with the ebb tide, the secret pain, the secret need in his eyes…

  “Just break the chain,” she pleaded.

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know…” She added, “We’ll pay you.”

  He studied her for a long time, while the fishing boats inched closer around them. “It’s just the gold you want then.”

  She nodded, her eyes on a passing gull. “So we’ll be rich. You’ll be rich, too,” she reminded him, and he made an odd noise in his throat.

  “I’ll do my best,” he said gravely, “to make us all rich.” He stood up again, then, and began to sing to the sea-dragon.

  The boats gathered about the Sea Urchin as he sang. The sea-dragon’s big, round eyes never moved from him. Birds landed on its head, dove for the fish that followed it constantly; it never moved. Swells nearly heaved the magician overboard a couple of times; he only shifted his feet as if he had been born in a boat and never left it. His songs were in strange languages; the words and tunes wove eerily into the wind and waves and the cries of the birds. The fishers waited silently, plying oars now and then to keep from running into one another, for the bottom dropped away from the world where they floated and there was nothing but darkness to anchor in.

  Gradually the songs became comprehensible. They were, Peri realized with astonishment, children’s songs. Songs to teach sounds, letters, words, the noises of animals. The fishers glanced at one another dubiously. The sea-dragon drifted closer; its eyes loomed in front of the Sea Urchin like round red doors.

  The magician stopped finally, hoarse and sweating. He poured himself a beer out of nowhere, and the fishers grinned. This was no flea-bitten fortune-teller.

  “My name,” he said, “is Lyo. This, we’ll assume for the moment, is a species of Ignus Dracus, which originated in the warm, light-filled waters of the Southern Sea, where kelp and brine shrimp abound. This one apparently muddled into the vast, slow-moving maelstrom formed by the south current as it shifts upward to meet the cold northeast current, which circles downward in its turn to meet the warm south currents again on the other side of the sea.” He paused to sip beer. The fishers listened respectfully. Some had even taken off their hats. “It got lost, in other words, which is, we’ll also assume for the moment, what it’s doing here. The chain, however is not a normal feature of Ignus Dracus. It is not a normal feature of anything I have ever laid eyes on in the sea. I will remove it for you. For a small fee, of course. A nominal fee. A quarter-weight of the salvaged chain.”

  They spoke then, jamming hats back on their heads. “A quarter of the gold! That’s—that’s—”

  “At this point, a quarter of nothing.”

  “That’s robbery!”

  “No,” Lyo said cheerfully. “Simple greed. I like gold. Take it or leave it. Remember: Three or four links alone will be enough to make the town rich. I can get you far more than that.”

  There was silence. “One link,” someone growled. “One link yours. The rest ours.”

  Peri laid her arms along the side of the boat and rested her chin on them, watching the sea-dragon. It seemed to enjoy the bargaining: Its head turned ponderously at every new voice. What was it really? she wondered. What had the magician seen within its great, calm eyes? Something to do with Kir?

  How had the magician known?

  “All right,” she heard him say finally. “The first link, and then one out of every five mine. Are we agreed?” He waited; a sea gull made a rude noise above his head. “Good. Now…just keep quiet for a couple of minutes, that’s all I need. Just…silence…”

  The Sea Urchin was inching toward the sea-dragon. The drift looked effortless, but it was against the tide, and Peri could see the drag of Lyo’s magic at his back. He was frowning deeply; his face seemed blanched beneath its tan. The sea-dragon’s eyes were dead ahead, twin portals of constant fire the Sea Urchin seemed determined to enter. The magician’s eyes burned like jewels in the bright reflection of the gold.

  The boat bumped lightly against the chain. There was not a sound around them, not even from the gulls. Lyo leaned forward, laid a palm on the massive, glowing chain. His hand and face seemed transformed: He wore a gauntlet and a mask of gold.

  And then the gold was gone. Peri b
linked, and blinked again. It was as if the sun had vanished out of the sky. The sea-dragon made a sound, a quick, timbreless bellow. Then its head ducked down and it was gone.

  All around the boats floated thousands upon thousands of periwinkles.

  Six

  “OOPS,” WAS ALL THE MAGICIAN SAID about it before he vanished. “Sorry.” A fisher from one of the larger boats rowed Peri in; he was glumly silent all the way until he slewed the Sea Urchin into its berth in the placid harbor. Then he spat into the water.

  “There are some men born to be magicians. And some magicians born to be fish bait.” He heaved himself out of the boat, headed toward the inn.

  Peri tied up the Sea Urchin, then stood a moment, feeling blank, a vast blue haze of periwinkles floating in her head. No more gold, the sea-dragon gone…

  “Periwinkles.” Her own voice startled her. She walked down the dock toward the inn, then veered away from it. She had no desire to hear Carey’s thoughts on the matter of gold turned into flowers. There would be days enough ahead for that. Months, likely. Where, she wondered, had the magician gone?

  Where had the sea-dragon and the gold gone? Where all the moonlit paths to the country beneath the sea always went? To that elusive land called memory?

  She sighed. In the bright, blustery afternoon, all the magic had fled, just when she had begun to believe it existed. And now, voices caught her ear from across the harbor, where the king’s lovely, fleet ships were docked.

  She stopped, staring. Sailors were scouring one of the ships, whistling; others loaded chests, white hens in cages…

  Someone else was leaving.

  She felt her eyes ache suddenly. She twisted her hair in her hands, away from her face. “Well,” she said to herself, her voice so swollen and deep it didn’t seem to belong to her, “what did you expect?” A horse returning riderless, a prince coming home half-drowned in the sea—even an absentminded father would pay attention to that.