Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

One night, the water having turned warm and silkily calm, she was drifting in a half dream of her own lagoon when she woke with a soft bump against what she at first thought an island. It loomed darkly over her, hiding the moon and half the stars, yet she saw no trees, even in silhouette, nor did she hear any birds or smell any sort of vegetation. What she did smell awakened her completely and set her scrambling backward into deeper water, like a frightened crab. It was a fish smell, in part, cold and clear and salty, but there was something of the reptilian about it: equally cold, but dry as well, for all that it emanated from an island — or not an island? — sitting in the middle of the sea. It was not a smell she knew, and yet somehow she felt that she should.

Kokinja went on backing into moonlight, which calmed her, and had just begun to swim cautiously around the island when it moved. Eyes as big and yellow-white as lighthouse lamps turned slowly to keep her in view, while an enormous, seemingly formless body lost any resemblance to an island, heaving itself over to reveal limbs ending in grotesquely huge claws. Centered between the foremost of them were two moon white pincers, big enough, clearly, to twist the skull off a sperm whale. The sound it uttered was too low for Kokinja to catch, but she felt it plainly in the sea.

She knew what it was then, and could only hope that her voice would reach whatever the creature used for ears. She said, “Great Paikea, I am Kokinja. I am very small, and I mean no one any harm. Please, can you tell me where I may find my father, the Shark God?”

The lighthouse eyes truly terrified her then, swooping toward her from different directions, with no head or face behind them. She realized that they were on long whiplike stalks, and that Paikea’s diamond-shaped head was sheltered under a scarlet carapace studded with scores of small, sharp spines. Kokinja was too frightened to move, which was as well, for Paikea spoke to her in the water, saying against her skin, “Be still, child, that I may see you more clearly, and not bite you in two by mistake. It has happened so.” Then Kokinja, who had already swum half an ocean, thought that she might never again move from where she was.

She waited a long time for the great creature to speak again, but was not at all prepared for Paikea’s words when they did come. “I could direct you to your father — I could even take you to him — but I will not. You are not ready.”

When Kokinja could at last find words to respond, she demanded, “Not ready ? Who are you to say that I am not ready to see my own father?” Mirali and Keawe would have known her best then: she was Kokinja, and anything she feared she challenged.

“What your father has to say to you, you are not yet prepared to hear,” came the voice in the sea. “Stay with me a little, Shark God’s daughter. I am not what your father is, but I may perhaps be a better teacher for you.” When Kokinja hesitated, and clearly seemed about to refuse, Paikea continued, “Child, you have nowhere else to go but home — and I think you are not ready for that, either. Climb on my back now, and come with me.” Even for Kokinja, that was an order.

Paikea took her — once she had managed the arduous and tiring journey from claw to leg to mountainside shoulder to a deep, hard hollow in the carapace that might have been made for a frightened rider — to an island (a real one this time, though well smaller than her own) bright with birds and flowers and wild fruit. When the birds’ cries and chatter ceased for a moment, she could hear the softer swirl of running water farther inland, and the occasional thump of a falling coconut from one of the palms that dotted the beach. It was a lonely island, being completely uninhabited, but very beautiful.

There Paikea left her to swim ashore, saying only, “Rest,” and nothing more. She did as she was bidden, sleeping under bamboo trees, waking to eat and drink, and sleeping again, dreaming always of her mother and brother at home. Each dream seemed more real than the one before, bringing Mirali and Keawe closer to her, until she wept in her sleep, struggling to keep from waking. Yet when Paikea came again, after three days, she demanded audaciously, “What wisdom do you think you have for me that I would not hear if it came from my father? I have no fear of anything he may say to me.”

“You have very little fear at all, or you would not be here,” Paikea answered her. “You feared me when we first met, I think — but two nights’ good sleep, and you are plainly past that .” Kokinja thought she discerned something like a chuckle in the wavelets lapping against her feet where she sat, but she could not be sure. Paikea said, “But courage and attention are not the same thing. Listening is not the same as hearing. You may be sure I am correct in this, because I know everything.”

It was said in such a matter-of-fact manner that Kokinja had to battle back the impulse to laugh. She said, with all the innocence she could muster, “I thought it was my father who was supposed to know everything.”

“Oh, no,” Paikea replied quite seriously. “The only thing the Shark God has ever known is how to be the Shark God. It is the one thing he is supposed to be — not a teacher, not a wise master, and certainly not a father or a husband. But they will take human form, the gods will, and that is where the trouble begins, because they none of them know how to be human — how can they, tell me that?” The eye-stalks abruptly plunged closer, as though Paikea were truly waiting for an enlightening answer. “I have always been grateful for my ugliness; for the fact that there is no way for me to disguise it, no temptation to hide in a more comely shape and pretend to believe that I am what I pretend. Because I am certain I would do just that, if I could. It is lonely sometimes, knowing everything.”

Again Kokinja felt the need to laugh; but this time it was somehow easier not to, because Paikea was obviously anxious for her to understand his words. But she fought off sympathy as well, and confronted Paikea defiantly, saying, “You really think that we should never have been born, don’t you, my brother and I?”

Paikea appeared to be neither surprised nor offended by her bold words. “Child, what I know is important — what I think is not important at all. It is the same way with the Shark God.” Kokinja opened her mouth to respond hotly, but the great crab-monster moved slightly closer to shore, and she closed it again. Paikea said, “He is fully aware that he should never have taken a human wife, created a human family in the human world. And he knows also, as he was never meant to know, that when your mother dies — as she will — when you and your brother in time die, his heart will break. No god is supposed to know such a thing; they are simply not equipped to deal with it. Do you understand me, brave and foolish girl?”

Kokinja was not sure whether she understood, and less sure of whether she even wanted to understand. She said slowly, “So he thinks that he should never see us, to preserve his poor heart from injury and grief? Perhaps he thinks it will be for our own good? Parents always say that, don’t they, when they really mean for their own convenience. Isn’t that what they say, wise Paikea?”

“I never knew my parents,” Paikea answered thoughtfully.

“And I have never known him ,” snapped Kokinja. “Once a year he comes to lie with his wife, to snap up his goat, to look at his children as we sleep. But what is that to a wife who longs for her husband, to children aching for a real father? God or no god, the very least he could have done would have been to tell us himself what he was, and not leave us to imagine him, telling ourselves stories about why he left our beautiful mother. why he didn’t want to be with us. ” She realized, to her horror, that she was very close to tears and gulped them back as she had done with laughter. “I will never forgive him,” she said. “Never.”