Dreams of Distant Shores

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  He spoke finally. “There is a price.”

  She nodded, hardly hearing, so relieved that he still spoke, and in a language she understood. “I’ll pay it. I just want Jonah back.”

  “He does not know his own way back.”

  She nodded again, jerkily. “So. Then I’ll come for him.” She paused, her eyes on the unblinking, sea-green eyes. “But will he—will he come with me?”

  She got no answer for a moment. Then, in a swift, graceful seal’s movement, he had slid out of the pool to the rocks beside her, so effortlessly she never felt his weight, just the altered position of his hand. He seemed camouflaged against the rocks, almost invisible; his scaly garment had changed color to suit his background.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He shrugged lightly. “He’s drifting like a ghost between worlds, neither here nor there, enchanted by a song, afraid to reach the singer. When he cries, he cries pearls; sea mosses drift against him and cling. He won’t die there, but it’s not much of a life.”

  Her eyes were huge behind her glasses. She opened her mouth; words stuck, burning. “Pearls?”

  “It’s pointless, crying tears in the sea.”

  “Jonah—Jonah doesn’t cry.”

  He looked at her; something behind his eyes—ice, a smile—made her shift. “He learned.”

  She drew breath through her open mouth. She said somberly, her eyes on the line where the pale mists touched the sea, “I’d better go and get him.”

  “If you want him. Why would you? He left you.”

  “You took him,” she said, and glanced at his fingers on her wrist. “You wanted him. I don’t know why. That little sea hare in my drawing that was you. You make the rules.”

  “Still,” he answered softly, “he may not want to return. I can’t promise that he will.”

  “Well.” She withheld tears stubbornly, turning her face to let the wind hide it beneath her hair. “What if he does want to come back and he doesn’t know how? I can’t just let him float around like a kelp leaf, dropping pearls and wishing he had something to read.”

  He smiled slightly. “You still love him? In spite of her?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. But I can’t leave him there with nothing human to talk to.” She lifted her head, shook hair out of her face. “How do I get down there? How did he find his way down?”

  “He was seduced by the sea.”

  She blinked. Then she met his eyes and felt the blood burn in her face. “That’s how.”

  “That’s one way.”

  “Well.” She licked her lips. “What are the other ways?”

  His smile deepened. “I could take you there. Why don’t you let me? It is the simplest way. Like falling into a dream. You take me in, I take you in. Simple.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Why? Jonah was unfaithful to you. He can’t expect you to be faithful to him.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Am I so unattractive to you?”

  “You’re beautiful, but you frighten me. Jonah, I know. And you’d make it easy for me to get into your world, but how easy would it be for me to get back? Nobody told Jonah how to get back.”

  He made a soft sound, and loosed her wrist finally. “Shrewd. You want to get there and back again.”

  “With Jonah.”

  “If he chooses. It will cost you,” he reminded her.

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, what?”

  “Yes, whatever it will cost.”

  “Not so shrewd.”

  “No,” she sighed, “but I don’t know how to bargain for Jonah. I don’t know how to say, you can have this for him, but not this. I don’t know what he’s not worth because right now he’s costing me everything. So take what’s left. What do you want?”

  “I’ll tell you when you find me again.”

  “Where—” She reached out then, to hold him, but he was sliding back down into the tide pool. “Wait! Adam!” She plunged her hand in after him, caught his hair; it turned into sea moss and left a tiny sand dollar in her fingers. She flung it in despair back into the pool. “Adam!”

  Three bubbles surfaced, floated a moment, and then popped, one after another, sending words into the air. “Draw,” they said, “the stairs.”

  So she opened her drawing pad and sat there, drawing the stairs she remembered from her dream. They began in the tide, each ebbing wave revealing another step, and then another. As she drew, the mists overhead blew inland and sunlight streaked the water. She made the steps out of pearls and kelp leaf, coral, scallop shells, the first step visible where the first wave broke, and the others sloping down, while the waves scrolled above them. As they descended into deep water, she drew kelp forests and seals and perch, sharks, the great winged rays, the whales that swam along her path. On the top step, she drew the sea hare.

  She looked up then, and saw the light glistening, breaking, glistening on something that the waves, stroke by stroke, were excavating like a lost city from the sand. She dropped paper and pen and ran, leaping off the rocks into the shallow surf, splashing through the tide, deeper and deeper until she reached the first white step. She looked down and saw them unfolding endlessly down, so far that the creatures of the deep swam, as she had drawn them, in vast cliffs of water along the stairs. She went down one step, a second, a third. Just before the walls broke and flooded together over her head, she saw the gold towers shining at the bottom of the sea.

  Jonah, left alone, stayed for a long time beside the door, sitting on the pearl path, his ear to the ivory, as close as he could get to the ancient and beautiful face of the singer. Twice, he rose and opened the door. Twice, he closed it, sat back down, unable to enter, unable to turn away from the woman for whom he had swallowed the sea. Finally he rose, drifted through the coral maze as if he were following the halting, incoherent pattern of his thoughts. He turned a corner at random and found Dory unexpectedly, pruning coral with a parrotfish.

  She wore a long, flowing pale green garment; but for the fish in her hand, she might have been some Victorian dowager tidying her garden. Her wild gray hair was being tidied by tinier fish, who picked the bubbles and dead plankton out of it as she worked. She glanced at Jonah before he could back out; he passed her, his shoulders hunched a little, against the hooked barbel of her derision.

  But she said only, “You’re not the first.”

  He stopped. “The first what?”

  “The first to look at that and turn away.” She gestured with the fish. “Sit.”

  He did, on a ledge of dead coral, grateful beyond words that she deigned to speak. He asked uneasily, “What happened to the others?”

  “Adam keeps his word. They’ve faded by now, overgrown with mosses, barnacles. They haunt the pilings of rotting piers; they fling themselves into every tide, hoping to be cast ashore.”

  “Did anyone—did anyone ever try to cross the waste?”

  She scratched her head with the parrotfish, thinking back. “A few,” she said, “but that was before it got so bad.”

  “Before—”

  “The waste changes, grows like some living, malignant thing.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I don’t know. They never came back out, that’s what I do know. Whether they reached Nereis or not, they never returned through the maze.”

  He watched her shift the parrotfish along a branch of coral. The graceful, flowing tendrils of the open polyps turned dark, in his mind’s eye: a long fall of shadow down a shell-white face, the single, glistening pearl. She had watched the first creature secrete the first shell, wrapping itself in delicate armor; she had watched it settle in the mud, the preserved form and structure; millions of years later, she had watched Jonah searching for it in cliffs formed after she was born. His back was to her; she sang, so that he would turn and face the living sea. “But why?” he whispered desperately, seeing the waste again. “Why?”

  Dory shrugged a little. “She’s untamed, like the sea. No
one questions her; no one questions the spindrift, or the shark’s tooth. It’s there, that’s all, to be dealt with or not. My other daughters—they’ve done their share of mischief, following ships, singing sailors overboard on a whim. Some mortals lived to tell about it; others didn’t. Some even coaxed my children ashore, for a time. But Nereis—she makes her own rules. What she wants, she takes, for her reasons, and there’s always a reason, for she rules the sea. She taught the great whales how to sing; she rides the dolphins as they leap. She set the spirals in the narwhal’s first horn, turning and turning with her hands. She is the restless eye of the sea; all its living things swim through her mind. She took you for a reason.”

  “Why?” His voice had no sound.

  “Ask her.” He did not answer; she shrugged again, shifting the parrotfish. “Then what will you do? Drift between earth and sea until you become a shadow, a ghost, a reflection of yourself, always wanting her and always afraid, mourning what you might have had, but never certain exactly what it was you lost, because you never had the courage to stare that darkness down?”

  “It’s more than dark. And it will take more than courage. I never had much to begin with. Or I never had to think about it.”

  “Adam told you your future: the open door or the closed door. There is nothing for you out here. No hope. No chance of escape. He won’t bargain with you. He knows all the faces of the sea, and all her moods. He takes for himself where he can, when he wants. He teases humans and sets them adrift in their own desires; sometimes he sees them safely back to shore. But, serving Nereis, he is implacable. She sets her terms; he won’t oppose her and he won’t help you.”

  “No mercy.”

  “As much,” she murmured obscurely, “as you give her.”

  He stirred himself to ask, then didn’t. Mercy, like courage, was one of those nebulous words contingent on action; he preferred going through life without needing to use them. He sat silently, hunched over himself, feeling his hair already drifting like moss. The siren song melted through him again, dark, husky, tender; he closed his eyes, felt the singer’s hands, the wild, roiling embrace of the sea, the pearl that had slid between her lips into his mouth. It’s simple, the song said. Just open the door and enter and come to me. I’m here in the tower, waiting for you. The rest is unimportant. Shadows. Dreams. Ignore them. I am the only reality. Nothing can keep you from me. I am the Queen of the Sea, and I am all the beauty in the sea, and more beautiful than any tale. Come to me. Come.

  He drew breath; pearls slid down his face. Dory glanced at him, a quick, sidelong question. He said, “After all, I never thought I could breathe water, either. I’ve already done one impossible thing.”

  Dory nodded vehemently, disturbing the little fish in her hair. “Yes.”

  “I’ll die in there.”

  “Possibly. “

  “But there’s an end to dying, in there. There’s no end out here. Just that song in me producing an inexhaustible supply of pearls. And Adam’s pitiless eyes.”

  “They are pitiless, aren’t they?”

  “His laughter’s worse.”

  “Worse. Much worse.”

  “And I might not die.”

  “No.”

  “And if I don’t die, I’ll see her face instead of his.”

  “Much more preferable.”

  “I remember her eyes, the first time I saw her sing. In that noisy, smoky bar. She met my eyes and I felt like I’d swallowed a lightning bolt. Did you ever feel like that?”

  “A hundred times.”

  “Even if I die, even if she’s cruel enough just to lure me in there to watch me be eaten, at least the song will stop.”

  “Is it so terrible?”

  “Oh, yes.” He felt the pearls brush down his face again. Dory turned; he met her eyes and let her see the new pearls forming. “Anything that beautiful is terrible. Because it’s outside of you. It’s not you. You’ll do anything to make it part of you. You’d eat it, drown in it, kill it, let it kill you. Anything to stop it from not being you.” He rose. “Even this.”

  “Wait,” Dory said quickly. She collected the pearls he had wept, put them in his pocket. “To remind you,” she said obscurely. He said nothing, waited, his eyes on the wall beyond the maze, until her busy hands found the last pearl, and she let him go.

  Megan reached the bottom of the stairway into the sea. The steps vanished, she had noticed some time back, one by one as she left them behind her. The ocean flowed tumultuously around her, behind her, overhead, but it never touched her. In this world she had entered, the ocean was the dream. The delicate walls and towers shimmering in the timeless golden light of a gentle summer afternoon were more substantial than the school of mackerel overhead. Was it Ys? she wondered. Or was it Tir na n’Og, Land of the Forever Young? Or were all these just human dreams, and this the land beneath the sea that had no human name? Or maybe, she thought uneasily, it was simply what she expected, and the truth lay beyond her eyesight, beyond human imagining.

  The last step vanished; she stood on a path of moonstones that led to the closed gate of the palace. The gate and walls were of crystal and glass, outlined in gold. Within, she could see a garden blown of glass: roses, hedgerows, stately trees whose great ridged leaves resembled kelp. She saw no one.

  There was a glass bell beside the gate, she saw as she came closer. A little glass hammer hung beside it. She wondered, as she lifted the hammer, if the entire world of glass would shatter around her when she struck the bell, to reveal the wildness behind its pristine face. Not even the bell cracked, but the deep sound that came from it, reverberating through the palace, seemed to shake even the light.

  The gate opened immediately, on its own accord, or by invisible hands. Megan stepped into the garden. She waited. No one came. What is this? she thought. This isn’t Adam’s world. This is like my drawings. This is some story out of a book. Where is the man who slithered up through a tide pool like a seal, with a starfish riding on his chest?

  She said aloud, tentatively, “Adam?” No one answered but the trees, their glass leaves ringing like small bells.

  She wandered through the garden, saw glass sea anemones among the windflowers; both moved gently to unseen currents. There were glass benches here and there among the trees, and statues of animals with fishtails: a mer-lion, a mer-peacock, a mer-swan, a mermaid. She looked closely at the mermaid. Its hair coiled over its shoulder like flowing honey; its brows slanted over wide-set eyes; the icy contours of cheekbone and jaw were seal-sleek and beautiful. Megan’s glasses misted suddenly. She touched them, swallowing, and forced herself to move.

  Maybe, she thought, all this is just a way to cushion the fact that Jonah wants to stay. A consolation present for Megan. She saw a door into the palace in the distance, the color of pale coral, limned in gold. As she neared, it opened.

  She stepped into a vast hall. Soft corals grew in pots, fanned gently by air or water. A grove of giant kelp stretched from floor to ceiling in one corner. Light from stained-glass windows drenched it; the colors danced like fish among the leaves. There was a wainscoting of white scallop shells along the walls; the shells were taller than she. Above them, more beasts frolicked in the sea: mer-unicorns, mer-dragons, mer-wolves, mer-elephants, even, Megan saw with astonishment, a mer-sphinx. Looking more closely at a mer-dragon, she realized it was alive: the walls were coral and all the vivid sea animals formed of coral polyps, pulsing gently to invisible tides.

  Am I in air or water? she wondered. She spoke Adam’s name again, watching for a bubble to form in the air. The name only dwindled in the silence.

  A door opened across the room, inviting her. She didn’t argue. Someone was thinking all of this, but why and how were beyond her speculation. The door led her up a spiral staircase. The tiles lining the steps were black, dark blue, and white, with tiny scallop shells at their corners. Colors changed; the lines in them opened and closed as if to the flow of water. There was a tile missing on one step. She knew, before
she studied it, that a piece of one corner would be still embedded in the step.

  Maybe this is Mike’s palace, she thought. What he dreamed up, around the tile, when he thought about it.

  The door at the top of the stairs opened to a bedchamber. It was a tiny tower room, with a bed and a chest, and windows that looked out over other gardens, other towers. She couldn’t see beyond the palace; the light was too bright. The bed was carved of oxblood coral; ropes of kelp hung in a canopy over it. The chest was a giant clam. It opened as she looked at it, revealed a dark, shimmering, close-fitting dress of fish scale and black pearl. It weighed nothing in her hands. Beneath it was, she decided finally, a net made of jellyfish tendrils. Beneath that was a cloak made out of starfish. Beneath that was a glowing ball of glass filled with water and tiny, luminous lantern fish. Beside that was a trident as long as her arm. It was made of bone and its three points were barbed.

  She touched a point, uneasy again. I can ignore all this, she thought, and tried to close the clamshell. It would not close. Nor would the chamber door open, no matter how she tugged.

  “Fine,” she muttered finally, dourly. “Fine.” She pulled her clothes off, tugged the scaly garment over her head. It had a light, papery feel, and it glittered silver-dark. The black pearls at sleeve and hem weighted it. Shoes had fallen out of it when she unfolded it; reluctantly she discarded her Reeboks. Shod in thin fish-scale slippers, she felt suddenly vulnerable. What, she wondered, am I supposed to do with a trident while I’m practically barefoot? To placate the clamshell, she tossed the cloak and the net over her arm. When she picked up lantern and weapon, the clam began to close.

  The chamber door opened.

  She went back down the stairs. A different door opened; she entered another huge airy room with a long table in the center of it. A single chair fashioned of mother-of-pearl stood at one end of the table. As she looked at it uncertainly, she smelled clam chowder.