Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The sea poured around him suddenly, hit the back wall; it echoed laughter as the wave withdrew. He grabbed at rock, cut his palm on a crusty barnacle. He waited for the powerful drag on his body to end, then slogged back over the whale bones between waves, wet to the crotch. Hugging the cliff above the deep water, where the lip of rock was narrowest, he came face-to-face with Adam Fin.

  He was laughing the deep booming laughter in the cave. He didn’t cling to the cliff, he leaned gracefully into it, so finely balanced that Jonah might have knocked him off with a pebble, except that he had no desire to see what Adam Fin would do in water. Dissolve, grow a fish’s tail, turn a seal’s face up at Jonah, or worse—whatever it was, he might not be found easily again. His teeth seemed even sharper in the sunlight.

  “Got a little wet,” he commented. “Didn’t you.” He reached out suddenly, caught Jonah’s wrist. Jonah, hanging on by one hand, nearly fell. He pushed himself back against the cliff, panting, and found Adam looking at his hand. “Cave bite?”

  “Barnacle,” Jonah said tersely. There was another wrench at his precarious balance; Adam twisted his hand back, held it over the water. Three drops of blood fell. Jonah turned his face into the cliff, swallowed a taste like iron in his throat. He forced himself to speak.

  “She said—Dory said—there is a price. Is this part of it?”

  “No. I’m just being perverse.” He laughed without sound at Jonah’s stare; his eyes were cold as rime. “What is it you want, Jonah?”

  “I want—” He stopped at the edge of saying, drew breath. He said to the barren cliff, “You know what I want. You knew before you laid eyes on me. She’s your sister. That’s all I know. But she’s nothing like you. She’s timeless, and she is the face of the sea, all its beautiful shapes and colors and all its songs. I don’t even know her name. She haunts me and she won’t let me find her. Help me. Tell me her name.”

  “Storm,” Adam said. “Undertow. Rapture of the deep.” Still he held Jonah’s hand over the sea, where green water weltered against stone. “You know her. She has shown her face before, rising in the wake of wrecked ships, singing to the doomed. Turn your face to land again, where you are loved. You could never pay her price. And the price you will pay will be too high.”

  “What price?”

  “Megan.”

  Jonah blinked at the word. It seemed incongruous, irrelevant, like an apple tree growing placidly out of the middle of the sea. “Megan. This has nothing to do with her. She’ll understand. And she can take care of herself.”

  The grip on his wrist tightened; he wrenched at it, then caught wildly at Adam’s wrist to keep from falling. They stood poised like dancers on the fine edge between land and sea. A high wave spun against the cliff’s edge; brine fanned into the air, flecked their hands, Adam’s eyes, Jonah’s mouth with bitterness.

  “You don’t know her,” Adam said.

  “I don’t know who? Megan? Of course I know her.” He stopped, blinking at another flick of water; his eyes narrowed, searching the pale, sea-washed face for a hint of expression. “You.” He tasted brine again, and spat. “You follow her. She lets you watch her draw. She talks to you. It’s you she wants, not me. So why are you throwing her name at me? You take care of her. Until this is over.”

  “You think you can walk on water to return to land.” Still his face held no more expression than a clam.

  “I am walking on water,” Jonah said tightly. “That’s all I can see, all I can hear. Tide and her voice, calling. Tell me where I can find her.”

  “What if I offer you something instead of her?”

  “There is nothing.” He swallowed, his throat tight. “Nothing instead of. Nothing without.”

  “What if I offer you freedom?”

  “Freedom?”

  “From her.”

  His eyes widened; his hold tightened, as if the cliff had shifted beneath him at the words. “No.”

  “Look at yourself,” Adam said softly. “You can’t even see out of your own eyes; you can’t remember your own past. You are already adrift in the sea, without enough sense to be afraid. You’re a stranger in your own life. The only voice you hear is hers, and she’s not even human. I’ll tell you how to stop that voice in your brain, in your blood. I’ll show you how to return to land before she pulls you underneath the waves.”

  “No.”

  “I warn you.” He spoke softly but very clearly through the tide spilling around them and the gulls crying overhead. “You will find her price too high.”

  “She can have whatever she wants,” Jonah said wearily. “Just tell me. Tell me where to find her. I’ll give you what you want for that. Anything.”

  The familiar cold, mocking smile surfaced finally in Adam’s eyes, like a shark fin cutting the calm surface of the sea. “You are so reckless with your promises, you humans. Don’t you pay attention to your own tales?”

  “I can’t pay attention to anything,” Jonah whispered. “I can’t see words anymore. I can’t even think. You offer me something I can’t refuse, then you laugh at me because I can’t refuse it. Just tell me where I can find her.”

  “You can find her where land touches sea, where lost ships founder against the siren’s song, where the last light of the sun and the first light of the moon touch the sea.” He dropped Jonah’s hand, and added, as Jonah groped wildly for him, “Or you can find her at the Ancient Mariner Friday night. She’ll be singing then.”

  He slid out of Jonah’s grip like a fish. Jonah turned his face to the cliff. He heard the splash a moment later; the sea reached up to touch his cheek.

  Megan, haunted by the dreams and shadows of memory cast up out of forgotten places in her brain, spent a frantic hour or two in Mike’s bookstore after Jenny came back from lunch.

  “They,” she demanded of Mike. “Who are they? Where do they live?”

  Mike wrapped his book around a thumb, sank his head onto one fist, and tapped a tooth meditatively with a forefinger. He removed the finger finally and said, “If you want names, names are in mythology.”

  “Mythology. But that’s not real. This is real.”

  He gazed at her so long she wondered if he, too, were about to change into something unexpected: answer her with a sea lion’s bark, or show her the webs between his fingers. He said finally, “There is the Kingdom of Ys, the beautiful, drowned city haunted by its princess, who sings to mortals and drags them down under the sea when they come to her. Someday, it is said, Ys will rise again. There is Sorcha, the sea kingdom of the selkies, the enchanted children of the king, who can live in the sea and on land, and who are tormented by their longing for both. There is Tir na n’Og, Land of the Forever Young, one of the Isles of the Blest, which appear out of the sea mists floating on the waves just long enough for mortals to see their unattainable richness and magic, before they sink back down beneath the waves. There is the Island of Glass, with its castles of light and crystal, that you might glimpse within the weaving strands of sunlight on the sea, if you don’t look directly at it. There is the realm up north, ruled by Sedna, whose temper is terrible and whose looks can kill, who watches with her single eye over the mammals of the ocean. There is Fata Morgana, the dream palace made of clouds which appears in the first misty light of morning, or in the last light over the sea before night. But.” He shrugged a little. “None of that will do you any good.”

  A couple of browsers, who had never heard him speak more than dollars and cents, gave him scattered applause among the shelves. Megan, entranced by glimpses of the hidden realms in Mike’s head, pleaded, “Why not?”

  “You said it. Mythology is what was real. What’s real now is for you to see. For you to say. That’s why it’s nowhere in here.” He opened his book. “But go ahead and look.”

  So she did, and found water kingdoms everywhere under the sea, but all safely bound between the lines of language, all belonging to someone else. She found the seals who walked ashore in human form and the sea goddess named Doris, who
had fifty children, and the sirens who sang so sweetly on rocks that they lured sailors to their deaths in the sea. But the sailors were trapped in the amber of tales, safe and unchangeable. None walked around now, drunk on secret music; none felt pain or gave it. Jonah, she thought, and felt the nick at her heart of fear and betrayal. Would he wreck his boat on the rocks or could she rescue him? Did he want to be rescued? Would she bother? And the sorrow in Adam Fin’s eyes was not a yearning for human love, but grief for something else. He had not filled her pockets with pearls, but with the broken pieces of the world she knew.

  But what was his world? A glint of light in a wave? In a bottle? Or was it more accessible? She closed the books and went out to where the true sea blew spindrift at her glasses and flowed over her feet, drowning her footprints as she passed. Mike had found a piece of it; there must be other pieces she could puzzle together, as they might puzzle, trying to fit together a jump-rope handle and a vacuum-cleaner nozzle and a bicycle chain. This time she ignored her own world; she let the garbage lie, and the agates and even the perfect sand dollars. Her pockets empty, she looked for nameless things to put in them.

  The long walk wearied her; her thoughts drifted, unmoored. The warm late afternoon light worked its odd magic on familiar things in her path. Her eye, persistent in its quest, transformed them. The sand dollar, whole and white as bone, was distinct as a moon on the wet sand; the world was upside down. Great ropy tangles of kelp with their dark, scaly leaves were mermaids, their thick golden hair coiled around them as they slept. Agates and sea glass shone like jewels; horses, white as foam, rode the waves, manes streaming behind them as they raced along the border between worlds, then vanished back into their own. Song drifted endlessly from the waves, luring, coaxing, pleading, in some forgotten language. The dead jellyfish had been a tiny, delicate floating kingdom of glass; the purple mussel shell a flake of dark castle wall; the white seal lying just beyond the surf was a man.

  She stopped, seeing the seal again, long, pale, and graceful. And then Adam. He turned seal’s eyes to look at her. And then they were sea eyes, foamy green. He was sunbathing. He was pale everywhere, sleek and muscled, a swimmer. He wore bathing trunks, but the way he looked at her, he might as well have worn nothing.

  She swallowed. Light lay between them, a curl of water. She took a step back. He was on his feet then, a movement too quick for the mortal eye. He stood in front of her, wordless, insistent, his skin speaking, luring, coaxing. His eyes promised knowledge, promised gentleness.

  She drew breath, loosed it slowly. She put the back of her hand to her mouth, and took another step away from him. She whispered, “Jonah.”

  He spoke her name; a pearl dropped out of his mouth into his hand. He touched her then, took her hand, smiling gently. He laid the pearl on her palm and closed her fingers over it. Light or sea ran between them; when she blinked, he was gone.

  The Ancient Mariner was crowded when Jonah walked into it on Friday. The musicians were still setting up. Whoops and crackles and other underwater noises came out of the sound system. In the dim light, faces looked unfamiliar, oddly shadowed. No one had the long dark hair he remembered. He went to the bar, ordered beer. He didn’t recognize the bartender.

  “Where’s Sharon?”

  The bartender, a slender, bearded young man with a shell in his ear, gave him a cheerful smile, but seemed not to hear his question. Jonah swallowed beer, feeling light-headed, edgy. He looked around more carefully. Faces crowded into the shadows, talking, laughing. She would not be laughing, he thought. Her face would be calm, mysterious as the moon, until she sang. But he did not see her.

  He finished the beer quickly; the bronze fixtures along the bar gleamed with a mellower light. The bartender passed him another. A familiar gravelly voice caught his ear; he ducked behind his bottle, upending it.

  He found someone at his elbow; he thought he recognized her, and then didn’t. There were a number of strangers, friends of the band probably, from other little towns along the coast. Here and there, at the candlelit tables, was the well-dressed tourist, wearing a skirt, heels, a tie. The band had changed; instead of being Hellbent they were the Undertow. There seemed a lot of them, as they moved around the stage, and they all seemed to look alike. Jonah, finishing his second beer, decided that was a trick of the lighting.

  Dory jostled along the bar, moored herself beside him. “So you’ve come,” she said.

  “Where is she?”

  “She’ll be here.” She sipped her briny drink and surveyed herself in the bar mirror. She touched her wild hair approvingly, widened a creepy gray eye, then settled into her normal expression of mingled crankiness and amusement. “She’s looking for Adam.”

  “Last I saw,” he said sourly, “he was feeding my blood to the sharks.”

  She chuckled. “He has his ways.” She touched her glass rim, licked salt off her finger. “He’ll be back.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  “He went looking for something, he said, along the tide line. Something he said you gave him.”

  “I didn’t give him anything,” Jonah said shortly, raising his empty bottle at the bartender.

  “You gave him something. You must have. You wouldn’t be here for free.”

  “Oh.” He ran a hand over his face, felt the stubble on it with surprise. He caught a glimpse of his own face in the mirror. It seemed ghostly, unfamiliar, the hair too long and fiery, the face gaunt, chalky. Can’t be mine, he thought. Dory was gazing at the face, too, curiously.

  “What did you give him?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Whatever he wanted.” He turned restively toward the stage. Lights flickered; something else flowed, glittered, just within the door beside the stage. He watched it, thoughtless, entranced. Dory’s voice jarred him again.

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “What?”

  “What you gave him?” He looked at her, wondering what she was talking about. She gave her rumbling, bitter chuckle. “What do you think he wanted from you? A fossil? A pair of earrings?”

  He turned impatiently, seeking the glittering shadow. “What does it matter? What in my life is worth anything to me anymore? Is that her? Is that her in the doorway?” He felt her: the undertow in his thoughts, in his blood. He didn’t hear Dory’s answer.

  He didn’t see anyone as he crossed the room, only the fine, star-shot shadow, shifting between dark green and black. The musicians, tuning, taping cable down, ignored him. He reached the door, stepped into the dark and heard the hollow, crashing boom of the tide.

  Cool, briny wind blew through the passage; an invisible breaker, flooding the shadows, flicked seawater on his lips. The narrow strip of light from the open door slanted across a still, pale face, a single pearl in an earlobe, dark hair falling over a dark fall of glittering fabric spilling open above a foam-white breast.

  He heard his heart pound. He made some noise, some movement; she lifted a hand, long and pale and as delicately jointed as coral.

  “Not yet.” Her voice, light, murmuring, was barely audible above the invisible tide. The hand moved out of the light; he felt it, touching his mouth. He lifted his hands to catch it, his lips parting as her finger traced them. Her hand slipped through his like water; in the light, he saw her eyes smile, an alien, luminous smile.

  He swallowed, his throat parched, lips burning, as if he had drunk seawater. “I don’t know your name,” he whispered.

  “My name is Nereis.” A secret wave gathered and broke; she swayed a little as if it swirled around her; the glittering, tide-tugged, parted between her breasts. He didn’t know he had lifted his own hand until he saw it in the light; his fingertips barely grazed cloth before she caught them.

  “When?” he demanded, and didn’t recognize his voice. “You call me and I try to find you, and you vanish, and now I’ve found you, you can touch me, but I can’t touch you—” He felt her tongue slide between his clenched fingers, and his voice broke. He stumbled fo
rward, brought himself up against the blank wall.

  “Jonah.” She spoke from where he had stood near the open door, her face in shadow now. “I am very old. Older than the little fossils you pick out of cliffs. Older than the cliffs themselves. And I am very dangerous.”

  He swallowed again, gazing at her, pushed against the wall as if by some churning onslaught of water. The water loosed him finally, pulled him off balance, a step toward her. He couldn’t see her face, but he saw, where her hair was swept back, the pearl a shade paler than her earlobe, that would be small and hard and silken against his tongue. He closed his eyes against it, pleaded, “Why? Why did you come to me in that cave?”

  “Because you heard my voice. I sang to you and you stood in the ancient seas and listened.” He felt her fingers again, light and quick, a touch of spindrift against his chest, and then the tide rising, flowing around his thighs, idling a moment, soundless and full, before its strong, churning pull away from his body. “You listened,” she said again, as he opened his mouth, drew breath, sagging against the wall. “And you love the forgotten sea. Jonah.”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Do you want me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you must find me.”

  He opened his eyes again. “I have found you.”

  “In your world,” she said, “but you must find me in mine. I cannot stay long on land. I am too ancient, too tide-drawn. You must come to me. If you want me.”