by Jim Butcher
“To tell him that I will never forgive him,” Kokinja answered. “So there is something even Paikea did not know.” She felt triumphant, and stopped wanting to cry.
“You are still not ready,” said Paikea, and was abruptly gone, slipping beneath the waves without a ripple, as though its vast body had never been there. It did not return for another three days, during which Kokinja explored the island, sampling every fruit that grew there, fishing as she had done at sea when she desired a change of diet, sleeping when she chose, and continuing to nurse her sullen anger at her father.
Finally, she sat on the beach with her feet in the water, and she called out, “Great Paikea, of your kindness, come to me, I have a riddle to ask you.” None of the sea creatures among whom she had been raised could ever resist a riddle, and she did not see why it should be any different even for the Master of All Sea Monsters.
Presently she heard the mighty creature’s voice saying, “You yourself are as much a riddle to me as any you may ask.” Paikea surfaced close enough to shore that Kokinja felt she could have reached out and touched its head. It said, “Here I am, Shark God’s daughter.”
“This is my riddle,” Kokinja said. “If you cannot answer it, you who know everything, will you take me to my father?”
“A most human question,” Paikea replied, “since the riddle has nothing to do with the reward. Ask, then.”
Kokinja took a long breath. “Why would any god ever choose to sire sons and daughters with a mortal woman? Half-divine, yet we die—half-supreme, yet we are vulnerable, breakable—half-perfect, still we are forever crippled by our human hearts. What cruelty could compel an immortal to desire such unnatural children?”
Paikea considered. It closed its huge, glowing eyes on their stalks; it waved its claws this way and that; it even rumbled thoughtfully to itself, as a man might when pondering serious matters. Finally Paikea’s eyes opened, and there was a curious amusement in them as it regarded Kokinja. She did not notice this, being young.
“Well riddled,” Paikea said. “For I know the answer, but have not the right to tell you. So I cannot.” The great claws snapped shut on the last word, with a grinding clash that hinted to Kokinja how fearsome an enemy Paikea could be.
“Then you will keep your word?” Kokinja asked eagerly. “You will take me where my father is?”
“I always keep my word,” answered Paikea, and sank from sight. Kokinja never saw him again.
But that evening, as the red sun was melting into the green horizon, and the birds and fish that feed at night were setting about their business, a young man came walking out of the water toward Kokinja. She knew him immediately, and her first instinct was to embrace him. Then her heart surged fiercely within her, and she leaped to her feet, challenging him. “So! At last you have found the courage to face your own daughter. Look well, sea-king, for I have no fear of you, and no worship.” She started to add, “Nor any love, either,” but that last caught in her throat, just as had happened to her mother Mirali when she scolded a singing boy for invading her dreams.
The Shark God spoke the words for her. “You have no reason in the world to love me.” His voice was deep and quiet, and woke strange echoes in her memory of such a voice overheard in candlelight in the sweet, safe place between sleep and waking. “Except, perhaps, that I have loved your mother from the moment I first saw her. That will have to serve as my defense, and my apology as well. I have no other.”
“And a pitiful enough defense it is,” Kokinja jeered. “I asked Paikea why a god should ever choose to father a child with a mortal, and he would not answer me. Will you?” The Shark God did not reply at once, and Kokinja stormed on. “My mother never once complained of your neglect, but I am not my mother. I am grateful for my half-heritage only in that it enabled me to seek you out, hide as you would. For the rest, I spit on my ancestry, my birthright, and all else that connects me to you. I just came to tell you that.”
Having said this, she began to weep, which infuriated her even more, so that she actually clenched her fists and pounded the Shark God’s shoulders while he stood still, making no response. Shamed as she was, she ceased both activities soon enough, and stood silently facing her father with her head high and her wet eyes defiant. For his part, the Shark God studied her out of his own unreadable black eyes, moving neither to caress nor to punish her, but only—as it seemed to Kokinja—to understand the whole of what she was. And to do her justice, she stared straight back, trying to do the same.
When the Shark God spoke at last, Mirali herself might not have known his voice, for the weariness and grief in it. He said, “Believe as you will, but until your mother came into my life, I had no smallest desire for children, neither with beings like myself, nor with any mortal, however beautiful she might be. We do find humans dangerously appealing, all of us, as is well-known—perhaps precisely because of their short lives and the delicacy of their construction—and many a deity, unable to resist such haunting vulnerability, has scattered half-divine descendants all over your world. Not I; there was nothing I could imagine more contemptible than deliberately to create such a child, one who would share fully in neither inheritance, and live to curse me for it, as you have done.” Kokinja flushed and looked down, but offered no contrition for anything she had said. The Shark God said mildly, “As well you made no apology. Your mother has never once lied to me, nor should you.”
“Why should I ever apologize to you?” Kokinja flared up again. “If you had no wish for children, what are my brother and I doing here?” Tears threatened again, but she bit them savagely back. “You are a god—you could always have kept us from being born! Why are we here?”
To her horror, her legs gave way under her then, and she sank to her knees, still not weeping, but finding herself shamefully weak with rage and confusion. Yet when she looked up, the Shark God was kneeling beside her, for all the world like a playmate helping her to build a sand castle. It was she who stared at him without expression now, while he regarded her with the terrifying pity that belongs to the gods alone. Kokinja could not bear it for more than a moment; but every time she turned her face away, her father gently turned her toward him once more. He said, “Daughter of mine, do you know how old I am?”
Kokinja shook her head silently. The Shark God said, “I cannot tell you in years, because there were no such things at my beginning. Time was very new then, and Those who were already here had not yet decided whether this was...suitable, can you understand me, dear one?” The last two words, heard for the first time in her life, caused Kokinja to shiver like a small animal in the rain. Her father did not appear to notice.
“I had no parents, and no childhood, such as you and your brother have had—I simply was, and always had been, beyond all memory, even my own. All true enough, to my knowledge—and then a leaky outrigger canoe bearing a sleeping brown girl drifted across my endless life, and I, who can never change... I changed. Do you hear what I am telling you, daughter of that girl, daughter who hates me?”
The Shark God’s voice was soft and uncertain. “I told your mother that it was good that I saw her and you and Keawe only once in a year—that if I allowed myself that wonder even a day more often I might lose myself in you, and never be able to find myself again, nor ever wish to. Was that cowardly of me, Kokinja? Perhaps so, quite likely unforgivably so.” It was he who looked away now, rising and turning to face the darkening scarlet sea. He said, after a time, “But one day—one day that will come—when you find yourself loving as helplessly, and as certainly wrongly, as I, loving against all you know, against all you are... remember me then.”
To this Kokinja made no response; but by and by she rose herself and stood silently beside her father, watching the first stars waken, one with each heartbeat of hers. She could not have said when she at last took his hand.
“I cannot stay,” she said. “It is a long way home, and seems longer now.”
The Shark God touched her hair lightly. “You will
go back more swiftly than you arrived, I promise you that. But if you could remain with me a little time...” He left the words unfinished.
“A little time,” Kokinja agreed. “But in return...” She hesitated, and her father did not press her, but only waited for her to continue. She said presently, “I know that my mother never wished to see you in your true form, and for herself she was undoubtedly right. But I... I am not my mother.” She had no courage to say more than that.
The Shark God did not reply for some while, and when he did his tone was deep and somber. “Even if I granted it, even if you could bear it, you could never see all of what I am. Human eyes cannot”—he struggled for the exact word—“they do not bend in the right way. It was meant as a kindness, I think, just as was the human gift of forgetfulness. You have no idea how the gods envy you that, the forgetting.”
“Even so,” Kokinja insisted. “Even so, I would not be afraid. If you do not know that by now...”
“Well, we will see,” answered the Shark God, exactly as all human parents have replied to importunate children at one time or another. And with that, even Kokinja knew to content herself.
In the morning, she plunged into the waves to seek her breakfast, as did her father on the other side of the island. She never knew where he slept—or if he slept at all—but he returned in time to see her emerging from the water with a fish in her mouth and another in her hand. She tore them both to pieces, like any shark, and finished the meal before noticing him. Abashed, she said earnestly, “When I am at home, I cook my food as my mother taught me—but in the sea...”
“Your mother always cooks dinner for me,” the Shark God answered quietly. “We wait until you two are asleep, or away, and then she will come down to the water and call. It has been so from the first.”
“Then she has seen you—”
“No. I take my tribute afterward, when I leave her, and she never follows then.” The Shark God smiled and sighed at the same time, studying his daughter’s puzzled face. He said, “What is between us is hard to explain, even to you. Especially to you.”
The Shark God lifted his head to taste the morning air, which was cool and cloudless over water so still that Kokinja could hear a dolphin breathing too far away for her to see. He frowned slightly, saying, “Storm. Not now, but in three days’ time. It will be hard.”
Kokinja did not show her alarm. She said grimly, “I came here through storms. I survived those.”
“Child,” her father said, and it was the first time he had called her that, “you will be with me.” But his eyes were troubled, and his voice strangely distant. For the rest of that day, while Kokinja roamed the island, dozed in the sun, and swam for no reason but pleasure, he hardly spoke, but continued watching the horizon, long after both sunset and moonset. When she woke the next morning, he was still pacing the shore, though she could see no change at all in the sky, but only in his face. Now and then he would strike a balled fist against his thigh and whisper to himself through tight pale lips. Kokinja, walking beside him and sharing his silence, could not help noticing how human he seemed in those moments—how mortal, and how mortally afraid. But she could not imagine the reason for it, not until she woke on the following day and felt the sand cold under her.
Since her arrival on the little island, the weather had been so clement that the sand she slept on remained perfectly warm through the night. Now its chill woke her well before dawn, and even in the darkness she could see the mist on the horizon, and the lightning beyond the mist. The sun, orange as the harvest moon, was never more than a sliver between the mounting thunderheads all day. The wind was from the northeast, and there was ice in it.
Kokinja stood alone on the shore, watching the first rain marching toward her across the waves. She had no longer any fear of storms, and was preparing to wait out the tempest in the water, rather than take refuge under the trees. But the Shark God came to her then and led her away to a small cave, where they sat together, listening to the rising wind. When she was hungry, he fished for her, saying, “They seek shelter too, like anyone else in such conditions—but they will come for me.” When she became downhearted, he hummed nursery songs that she recalled Mirali singing to her and Keawe very long ago, far away on the other side of any storm. He even sang her oldest favorite, which began:
When a raindrop leaves the sky,
it turns and turns to say good-bye.
“Good-bye, dear clouds, so far away,
I’ll come again another day....”
“Keawe never really liked that one,” she said softly. “It made him sad. How do you know all our songs?”
“I listened,” the Shark God said, and nothing more.
“I wish... I wish...” Kokinja’s voice was almost lost in the pounding of the rain. She thought she heard her father answer, “I, too,” but in that moment he was on his feet, striding out of the cave into the storm, as heedless of the weather as though it were flowers sluicing down his body, summer-morning breezes greeting his face. Kokinja hurried to keep up with him. The wind snatched the breath from her lungs, and knocked her down more than once, but she matched his pace to the shore, even so. It seemed to her that the tranquil island had come malevolently alive with the rain; that the vines slapping at her shoulders and entangling her ankles had not been there yesterday, nor had the harsh branches that caught at her hair. All the same, when he turned at the water’s edge, she was beside him.
“Mirali.” He said the one word, and pointed out into the flying, whipping spindrift and the solid mass of sea-wrack being driven toward land by the howling grayness beyond. Kokinja strained her eyes and finally made out the tiny flicker that was not water, the broken chip of wood sometimes bobbing helplessly on its side, sometimes hurled forward or sideways from one comber crest to another. Staring through the rain, shaking with cold and fear, it took her a moment to realize that her father was gone. Taller than the wavetops, taller than any ship’s masts, taller than the wind, she saw the deep blue dorsal and tail fins, so distant from each other, gliding toward the wreck, on which she could see no hint of life. Then she plunged into the sea—shockingly, almost alarmingly warm, by comparison with the air—and followed the Shark God.
It was the first and only glimpse she ever had of the thing her father was. As he had warned her, she never saw him fully: both her eyesight and the sea itself seemed too small to contain him. Her mind could take in a magnificent and terrible fish; her soul knew that that was the least part of what she was seeing; her body knew that it could bear no more than that smallest vision. The mark of his passage was a ripple of beaten silver across the wild water, and although the storm seethed and roared to left and right of her, she swam in his wake as effortlessly as he made the way for her. And whether he actually uttered it or not, she heard his fearful cry in her head, over and over—“Mirali! Mirali!”
The mast was in two pieces, the sail a yellow rag, the rudder split and the tiller broken off altogether. The Shark God regained the human form so swiftly that Kokinja was never entirely sure that she had truly seen what she knew she had seen, and the two of them righted the sailing canoe together. Keawe lay in the bottom of the boat, barely conscious, unable to speak, only to point over the side. There was no sign of Mirali.
“Stay with him,” her father ordered Kokinja, and he sounded as a shark would have done, vanishing instantly into the darkness below the ruined keel. Kokinja crouched by Keawe, lifting his head to her lap and noticing a deep gash on his forehead and another on his cheekbone. “Tiller,” he whispered. “Snapped... flew straight at me...” His right hand was clenched around some small object; when Kokinja pried it gently open—for he seemed unable to release it himself—she recognized a favorite bangle of their mother’s. Keawe began to cry.
“Couldn’t hold her... couldn’t hold...” Kokinja could not hear a word, for the wind, but she read his eyes and she held him to her breast and rocked him, hardly noticing that she was weeping herself.
The Shark
God was a long time finding his wife, but he brought her up in his arms at last, her eyes closed and her face as quiet as always. He placed her gently in the canoe with her children, brought the boat safely to shore, and bore Mirali’s body to the cave where he had taken Kokinja for shelter. And while the storm still lashed the island, and his son and daughter sang the proper songs, he dug out a grave and buried her there, with no marker at her head, there being no need. “I will know,” he said, “and you will know. And so will Paikea, who knows everything.”
Then he mourned.
Kokinja ministered to her brother as she could, and they slept for a long time. When they woke, with the storm passed over and all the sky and sea looking like the first morning of the world, they walked the shore to study the sailing canoe that had been all Keawe’s pride. After considering it from all sides, he said at last, “I can make it seaworthy again. Well enough to get us home, at least.”
“Father can help,” Kokinja said, realizing as she spoke that she had never said the word in that manner before. Keawe shook his head, looking away.
“I can do it myself,” he said sharply. “I built it myself.”
They did not see the Shark God for three days. When he finally emerged from Mirali’s cave—as her children had already begun to call it—he called them to him, saying, “I will see you home, as soon as you will. But I will not come there again.”
Keawe, already busy about his boat, looked up but said nothing. Kokinja asked, “Why? You have always been faithfully worshipped there—and it was our mother’s home all her life.”
The Shark God was slow to answer. “From the harbor to her house, from the market to the beach where the nets are mended, to my own temple, there is no place that does not speak to me of Mirali. Forgive me—I have not the strength to deal with those memories, and I never will.”
Kokinja did not reply; but Keawe turned from his boat to face his father openly for the first time since his rescue from the storm. He said, clearly and strongly, “And so, once again, you make a liar out of our mother. As I knew you would.”