Kim Robinson - A Short, Sharp Shock

He found out what had happened to her in the time since the storm on the brough, but only in snatches, in response to his questions. She had bitten her way free of the rope, as he had guessed. She had swum for a long time, she couldn’t say how long, but from the way she spoke of it (or didn’t), he thought it might have been very long indeed; days, certainly. She had landed on the southern side, and, assuming they had all survived and made it to the cape, she had walked back to it and searched for them, but found nothing. She waited there for a long time, regaining her strength and assuming she would see Birsay, escorting other travelers across; but no one ever appeared, and so finally she started west again. Groups traveling east to west passed her, and she had hidden from them, afraid that they might be the spine kings or the sorcerers. And then one night she had come on him in the ruins.

“We may have been wandering on the opposite sides of that cape at around the same time,” Thel said. “And even along the peninsula.” It was painful to think that he could have avoided the whole episode at Khora’s, simply by making an arbitrary change of direction that would have resulted in running into the swimmer earlier. “Ah, but then I spent a long time out on the drawbridge, as I called it. Did you see that?” He described it; she had, but had passed by it without stopping.

“We’re lucky we ever met again at all,” she said. “It’s a big world.”

“But narrow.” The thought of never meeting her again made him shiver. “As long as we both continued westward…”

“We were lucky. We’ve always been lucky.”

One night after lying down and talking for a while they rolled together and kissed, then mated, and at first he was frightened, but it was such an affirmation, such a gesture of liking, that it was hard for him to believe it was the same act he had performed with Khora. It wasn’t, really, and the difference was such that he began to find it hard to remember those nights in the queen’s chamber; they slipped away, except in certain dreams that woke him trembling.

As they continued westward the peninsula rose in elevation again, the backbone of pure granite breaking up out of the sea and sand and climbing like the edge of some enormous battered scimitar. They walked without urgency, merely to walk, to create a good space between themselves and Khora and all that lay behind, and each day was spent watching where each step went, climbing the shattered staircase of stone, becoming intimate with the local granite, an ever-modulating mixture of feldspars pink or orange or yellow, big clear grains of quartz, flecks of black hornblende. These three types of rock, jumbled and melded, formed the hard cracked fin of granite lifting out of the sea: it was hard for Thel not to be mesmerized by such a thing, to imagine it amelt and flowing like candlewax under the immense pressures inside the earth.

They came to a long straight stretch of the spine, where the feldspar was white and hornblende just freckled the mix, making it the whitest granite possible. Here the southern side of the spine became a perfectly vertical drop to the sea, while the northern flank offered a gentle rocky slope to a wide white beach. The trail stayed well away from the southern cliff, but at midday or dusk they sometimes walked up to the edge to take a look down, and one evening in a dulcet sunset they looked over the edge and found that the whole cliff was a single gigantic overhang, as if the spine had been tipped to the south. They looked straight down at the sea, and could see nothing of the upper two-thirds of the cliff under them.

Quickly they stepped back, then lay flat and crawled forward, to stick their heads over the edge and have another look. The two or three thousand feet of the cliff looked like the curved inner wall of a shallow cave; they lay on an immense overhang. Thel could feel his stomach trying to reach through his skin and clamp onto the rock, like an abalone muscle; the drop was such that he and the swimmer laughed, in an instinctive attempt to ward off the fear of it. Thel crawled back and grabbed a loose rock that was as heavy as he cared to play with in that area, and shoved it over the edge. They watched it fall until it was a speck that disappeared, but the splash was bigger, a brief burst of white in the flat plate of blue, a long distance offshore from the cliff’s bottom. They exclaimed at the sight, and did it again, and then they lay there until the light was almost gone, hypnotized by the lascivious false sense of danger, the sublimity. Mid-dusk a flock of sea-birds rose up from the water in spiraling gyres, big white birds like cormorants that apparently nested in cracks or arches in the exfoliated cliff under them, out of their sight—for the birds rose and rose, tilting together on up-drafts, flapping and banking, growing bigger, shifting this way and that like bubbles rising in water.

A week or so later the spine twisted south and dropped again, fanning out into a big broken rockfield, granite hills and knobs faulted with long grabens that had become skinny ponds or rectangular pools, or thin meadows that cut the rock from beach to beach. Up and down they walked over this terrain, sometimes on the trail which continued to snake its way along the path of least action, or else rambling over the rock, down into a meadow, up ledges, over the rock, down into another grassy swale. It was good land, dotted with trees that clung to the steep jumbles of rock and soil that walled the meadows: foxtail pines, no taller than the two travelers but with thick riven trunks, and bare dead branches spiking out of them in every direction. Steep bluffs stood over the white bay beaches, and many of the bluff tops were rimmed by a tuck of these foxtails, growing crabbed and horizontal in the winds.

They crossed this land for many days, and one afternoon when they were foraging on the southern beach for food, they came upon a shallow bay, a perfect arc of a circle. The bluffs backing the bay were cut by sandy ravines, and between bluff and beach there was a crescent of dunes covered with olive and silver grass.

Scattered over the dunes in irregular rows were seashells as big as houses. They resembled nautilus shells in which the smaller segments have been pulled a bit out to the side, but they stood about three or four times Thel’s height. Their thick curved walls were colored in complex spiraling patterns of brown or deep purple trapezoids, which turned with the shape of the shells and grew smaller and smaller as they twisted around to an invisible center point, like the eyefaces of the facewomen.

Thel and the swimmer walked among these specimens in awe, observing how they gleamed in the late afternoon light, for each one appeared to have been polished as smooth as glass; and there were even, they saw, windows of some clear material replacing some of the brown and purple trapezoids, high in the curved sides.

They were just looking under the bottom edge of one shell when a short brown woman ducked out and regarded them suspiciously. “Who are you?” she demanded, touching the thick edge of her shell, looking as though she might bolt back under at any second. “What are you doing?”

“I am a swimmer,” the swimmer said gently. “This is Thel. We are travelers from east of the brough. We seek nothing of you, and will leave if our presence makes you unhappy.”

“No, no,” the woman said. “Not necessary.” As she spoke, others ducked out from their shell cottages, people small like the woman, and with leathery skin of brown or purplish cast. They were a nervous crowd, and as they shuffled about the two they moved away reflexively each time the swimmer gestured. But in the end they welcomed the two cordially enough, and invited the travelers to eat with them a varied meal of fish and seaweed bits, washed down by a sparkling liquor that made the two instantly drunk. The shell people offered them a shell of their own to spend the night in, and they agreed, dropping to hands and knees to get under the edge of one really large brown-flecked specimen.