Something Rich and Strange

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “What?”

  “Still want me?”

  “Oh, Jonah, I’m here. What do you think?”

  For an instant, he was uncertain. The shadow loomed overhead, turned toward him with sleek, deadly grace. Then it swam out of eyesight. He bowed his head, said bleakly, “I don’t think she’ll let me go. I’ve promised her—whatever life I have left.”

  She put her hands over her mouth. “No,” she whispered.

  “That sea out there.” He paused, swallowed, still staring at his hands. “I didn’t recognize her.”

  “What?”

  “She—there were things I could have done. Should have done. Things I should have realized. She brought me down here to see, and I couldn’t see anything at all, only her. I hardly even heard the whale, and it nearly fell on top of me. I just wanted it to be quiet so that I could hear her song again. Did you see it out there? The whale?”

  She nodded jerkily. She was crying suddenly, noiselessly, her eyes wide behind her glasses, her mouth still hidden behind her hands. “Yes. I saw it.”

  “She’s very angry with me. That was her song, too, she said. The whale’s song. I just—” He shook his head slightly, dislodging a tiny snail. “I just wasn’t listening. I wasn’t seeing. All I could see was this tower. All I could hear was her voice So.” He drew a long breath, looked at her finally. “You might have made a trip for nothing.” He paused; she still gazed at him wordlessly, weeping tears from one eye, pearls from the other. He added, “But thank you,” fixing her in his memory one last time: her long pale floating hair, her lean body, mysterious beneath its dark shimmer of fish scale. “It was more than I deserved. Considering.”

  “Oh, Jonah!” She had crossed the distance between them suddenly. “Why didn’t you help the damn whale?” Her fists pounded at him a moment. “It wasn’t that hard!” She stopped beating him, and pushed herself against him, her arms around him tightly, her face against his neck. “She can’t keep you. It’s not fair. Maybe there’s some way—” She drew back abruptly, tugged impatiently at the kelp around his wrists, unweaving the long golden ropes, while he stared, his face still, at the top of her head. “Maybe if I talk to her. Or Adam does. He told me to come here and ask, so I’ll ask—Where is she, anyway?”

  “What do you mean,” he asked slowly, “it wasn’t that hard?”

  “What?”

  “About the whale. You said it about the whale.”

  “Oh. I just used a piece of broken crab shell. It cut like a knife. And there…” Her voice faltered oddly. “And it wasn’t—it wasn’t a real whale. I mean, it was until I freed it. And then it changed.”

  “Into what?” he whispered. She lifted her head after a long silence, met his eyes.

  “Adam.”

  He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw Adam standing beside his sister.

  They did look alike, he realized numbly. Some of Adam’s wildness shaped her beauty; some of her ceaseless, desperate love for her realm shaped his. Nereis put her hand on Adam’s shoulder, said to him as the butterflyfish darted back into the tendrils of her hair, “You did well. Far better than I did.”

  “You sang far too well,” he said gently. Megan, startled, had turned in Jonah’s hold. For a moment, her eyes clung to Adam, until he gave her a smile, bittersweet and without malice, that amazed Jonah. Then her eyes moved to his sister.

  Staring at the ancient, sea-formed face, she said, “Oh,” soundlessly; the word, caught in a round bubble, floated upward. She shifted closer to Jonah. “You’re not,” she said shakily to Nereis, “at all what I thought you would be. I thought you would be more human. If I had—if I had known—I would never have dared come for him.”

  “If I had known him better,” Nereis said, “I would have sung to you instead.” The sharpness in her voice sent a tremor through the water; the butterflyfish swarmed and flashed uneasily.

  Megan felt the tremor pass through Jonah. She drew breath, said helplessly, “I think I’ve bargained away everything I own to Adam. But if I have anything left—anything worth Jonah’s life—it’s yours. Adam told me I could ask you to free him. If you would let him return with me. If he wants to come. If you will free him. I’ll give you what you want.”

  “Why?” Jonah whispered. “Why, Megan? I vanished out of your life to follow a singer. A song. Why did you come for me? Why did you bother?”

  “You were part of a puzzle,” she said without looking at him. “The sea came into my drawings, it walked into your store, it flooded into my life and it took me like it took you—I wanted to know why. And. Because. I missed you.” She looked at him finally; her voice softened. “I missed you. I thought you might be missing the world. In tales, people do.”

  “In and out of tales,” he said starkly, “people die in the sea. I won’t let you sacrifice anything more for me. I’ve already promised my life to the sea. I won’t bargain away that promise.”

  “That,” the sea queen sighed, “is the first sign of hope you have given me. I want both your lives.” Adam glanced at his sister swiftly; she read his thoughts. “No. She is not for you. She is for me.”

  His mouth tightened a little. “You’re sending them back.”

  “How else can they help me?”

  “Can I bargain with you?”

  “No. You are far too subject to whim to make any human happy. Unless you want me to give you up, send you with them to live and die among humans.”

  He opened his mouth to answer, then hesitated. Megan was stunned by the expression on his face; so, it seemed, was the sea queen. Jonah’s hand closed suddenly on Megan’s shoulder. They said, the three of them, before Adam chose, “No.”

  He blinked, as if some chasm had opened and then vanished again in front of him. He looked reproachfully at Megan. She said, her eyes stinging in the brine, “You already have my heart. You’ll forget me long before I forget you.”

  “Perhaps,” he said softly, “you are right. But watch for me anyway in your drawings. I have a very long memory.”

  “And you also will leave your heart in the sea,” the sea queen said to Jonah. “You will return to land, but your eyes and thoughts and your life belong to me. I am dying. You saw that. For the rest of your life, you will stay within the sound of my voice, the sound of the changing tide. Your life is linked to mine. As I die, so will you; as I become stronger, so will you. You must help us both. For so long I watched you caring about the lost, forgotten life of the sea, when I was young and all life came from me. I sang to you because I need you to see me as I am now. You must find ways in your world to help me. I am no stronger than the most minute life in the sea. If you kill that, I begin to die. The smallest thing you can do to help me will give me strength to live. My song will be in your blood, in your dreams, in your past and future. If my life is short, so will yours be. When my voice stops, so will your heart, for I hold your heart in mine for the rest of our lives.”

  Jonah bowed his head. He heard her song again, sweet, haunting, within the sound of the tide; beneath it, within it, he heard his own heartbeat. He whispered, “You hold all of our hearts in your heart.”

  Water shaped itself against him; he felt her, the intimate tide, her song flooding around him until he could no longer stand. His mouth filled with her; she caught his swaying body, dragged him deep into foam and brine, a churning rush of water that slid over him, under him, searched him for buried treasure and fought him for his bones, and cast him finally, with a wild plunge and roil of froth, piecemeal on the sand, where he lay with his lips to the receding tide. Megan, borne ashore on a silken wave of foam, felt its pale fingers everywhere before it loosed her reluctantly to land.

  She rolled onto her back, heard the seagulls cry. She felt Jonah’s hand groping, touching hers. After a wave or two, she slid her fingers into his; their hands locked. After another breath or three, she opened her eyes to the cool purple and gold of the setting sun.

  Jonah raised himself on one elbow, put his arm aro
und her, gathered her as close as he could, until only the most persistent waters came between them. Something cold touched his mouth; he stirred finally, opened his eyes.

  A black rabbit running under a quarter moon of silver hung from her ear. She heard his breath still, and raised her face blurrily. Salt was drying on her glasses; he had lost his. She pulled hers off, dropped them in the sand, and saw his eyes, turned seaward then, haunted, troubled, as if he were losing some great treasure beneath the waves, and would bail out the sea with a scallop shell to save it.

  The expression faded; he crossed the distance, came back to her. She kissed him swiftly, knowing he would be possessed, he would leave her like that, again and again, as long as she stayed with him. He kissed her back, awkwardly, tentatively. He shifted suddenly, as something hard met bone; he loosed her, turned a little, to push one hand into his pocket. He brought out a handful of pearls.

  “To remind me,” he said finally, a little bitterly, as he looked at them. She nodded.

  “I know. I have one, too.” She slid one of her fish-scale slippers off, shook it. A pearl, large and slightly misshapen, glistening with grays and purples, dropped between them; she picked it quickly out of the foam. She turned it in her hand, watching the colors change, for a long time before she felt his eyes.

  She met his gaze, saw him unsure, this time, what he had lost, or if he had lost anything at all, or everything. She smiled a little, unsure herself, half-human, half-mermaid with her pale wet hair, her legs gleaming darkly with fish scale, curled gracefully under her. Then she tossed the pearl back to a receding wave.

  “It was just a gift,” she said. “Like yours.”

  He blinked, his face easing, and leaned forward to kiss her again, before he said, “Mine are tears.”

  They rose finally, walked hand in hand out of the tide. He looked back once, and so did she, seeking the place where steps might have begun that led down to the land beneath the waves, where a sea hare might wait for her, carrying a dark pearl between its horns. She saw a little ribbon of foam, headed back to sea, turned purple by the dusk.

  Afterword

  by

  The Faerie Otherworld coexists as the internal, mirror world of our own. The Celts believed that the barriers between these worlds became thin at certain times of the year (especially on May Day or Hallowe’en) and at these times Faerie and man could freely commune. Within the great yearly cycle are many smaller ones, as the moon waxes and wanes and the day turns into night. Twilight, when it is neither light nor dark, is another potent Faerie rime; similarly midnight is a time when the gateways to Faerie briefly open. In this sense, all boundaries, edges, and thresholds are potential gateways into the Faerielands.

  The seashore is such a place, where the solid land gives way to the ever-changing sea. In the moonlit ebb and flow of the tides, our fixed perceptions and blocked emotions dissolve into mystical “lunacy.” The sea hare appears, to lead us into the fluid, transmutable Faerie realms. Like the songs of the sea, the songs of Faerie can be oh-so-seductive, calling us from the mundane world into enchantment. The word glamour originally referred to Faerie glamour, or glamer, a “juggling of sight,” a magical charm creating illusions not connected to reality. The Faerielands lure us with their glamour—but then we must be wary, for there can be danger in answering the call of Faerie’s song.

  The peril lies in getting carried away by the seductive tide, caught in Faerie’s mutable enchantments. Folklore is full of tales of unwary humans stepping into the Faerielands where they are overcome with inertia, abdicate responsibility, remain trapped within the languid images of false imagination. The journey into Faerie, instead of being full of growth and discovery, can all too easily become a Peter Pan-like refusal to grow. One night of dancing with Faeries can prove to be years or a lifetime gone.

  As we enter into the Faerielands we must pass these bright illusions and journey on farther from the borders of the realm, into the mythic waters where rigid ideas and preconceptions undergo a sea-change into “something rich and strange.” Here, in the mirror world, it is our own assumptions that are the false illusion and the Faeries that stand revealed as the truth. They are the true inner nature of all things—energy and life and emotion made manifest in forms shaped from our deepest dreams.

  A Faerie encounter shows us a vibrant, animated universe where there is spirit and soul in every leaf and stone. It shows us the connectedness of all the things that make up our world. It reminds us, in ways both joyous and harsh, to maintain a proper relationship with the earth itself. We can no longer believe we are beyond nature; like the Faeries, we live within it, we are part of it. To damage the earth is to damage Faerie; to damage Faerie is to damage ourselves.

  The borders of the Faerielands are all around us, when we choose to open our minds and hearts, seeking insight instead of illusion. The true paths through the Faerielands do not lead us to retreat into a cozy fantasy world, but rather to reengage with reality, with the world, and with ourselves. In my drawings and paintings for these Faerielands books, I have shared some of my own experiences in years of wandering down twisting Faerie paths. Patricia McKillip has found another path, made of salt water and moonlight. And there are many more yet to be discovered.

  (Limited-edition prints of this book cover and additional works by award-winning British artist Brian Froud are available through Mithril Publishing, 4060-D Peachtree Road, Suite 291, Atlanta, GA 30319. Telephone: (404) 662-7574.)

  BRIAN FROUD is the design genius behind such films as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. He is also well known for his enchanting fantasy cover illustrations, as well as his previous books: The Land of Froud, Goblins, and the bestselling Faeries (with Alan Lee). He lives in Devon, England.

  PATRICIA A. McKILLIP was born in Salem, Oregon, and received an M.A. in English literature from San Jose State University. Living for close to a quarter of a century in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has published fantasy and science fiction novels and short stories for both adults and young adults. Her best-known titles are the Riddle-Master trilogy (The Riddle-Master of Hed, Heir of Sea and Fire, and the Hugo Award-nominated Harpist in the Wind) and The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which won a World Fantasy Award. More recent works include The Changeling Sea, The Sorceress and the Cygnet, and The Cygnet and the Firebird. She is now living in upstate New York.