Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

“Then why have you swum the sea to find him?” asked Paikea. It snapped its horrid pale claws as a human will snap his fingers, waiting for her answer with real interest.

“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.”