Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

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:

“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.