Robin McKinley - Water

Other jewels blazed or sparkled or glowed in turn, and were lost. The seed pearls on the woman’s covering woke into an iridescent design which then flowed away, rippling like some luminous sea-thing, into the Kraken’s inward blackness. When they were gone, Ailsa was once more in total dark.

Now in her mind she saw the Kraken moving its tendrils to inspect the lovers. Despite the weight on the sled they had fallen no farther. Light glowed again, but this time she was unsure whether she was seeing it through her eyes or in her mind, faint streaking glimmers moving to and fro across and through the immense dark mass—dots of light, she thought, but moving so fast that they seemed to be glowing lines. She had no idea what this meant.

When the Kraken had done with the lovers, it briefly considered the sleds on which they lay, then turned its attention to Ailsa. Sensing the movement of the black tendrils towards her, she raised her hands, removed her diadem and offered it to them. As they touched it, the sapphire shone with a pure, pale light, more brilliant, more truly a jewel, than she had ever known it. Always before it had merely refracted the light that fell on it, tingeing that light with its colour. Now it was as if the Kraken was summoning out of it the sapphire’s inner light, and drawing that light into its own blackness, just as cold calls heat into it but heat cannot call cold.

When the blue blaze of the sapphire was gone, she offered one by one her carcanet, pendant, earrings and tail bracelet and watched them sparkle or flame at the Kraken’s touch. There was one small diamond in the carcanet that Ailsa had never particularly noticed as being different from any of the others which now shone out with the brilliance of Orion. When the Kraken had done with each piece, it took it into itself. Then it turned its attention to her.

The tendrils were soft, more feathery than the finest sea fern. She could scarcely feel their touch as they explored her shape, lingering a little at the waist where the smooth skin ended and the scales began. She saw again the strange darting lights, fewer than there had been with the lovers. When they had explored her tailfin, the tendrils moved up her body and gathered at the back of her head. Three times yesterday she had been asked the same dark question, but had not understood. Now she did.

The Kraken was not much interested in her. She was an oddity, with her airfolk torso and fish tail, but the ocean teems with oddities and the Kraken knew as much about them as it wished to. No, what absorbed it, what had caused it to move its vast mass across the ocean floor and shake the mountain in its anger, was the lovers. What could Ailsa tell it about them?

This time she did not need to put her story into words, which meant that she could tell it all, exactly as it had been. She felt that she could show, did in fact show the Kraken every sunlit droplet that had whipped from the wave-tops and every wisp of cloud-stuff that had puffed from the black tubes as the fight went on. She created again the arc of the sword through the air, created the precise poise, serene, passionate, unrepeatable, in which the lovers had balanced on the rail while the struggle had raged beyond them and the woman had buckled the sword belt round them so that they should go down unseparated into darkness. She created the final splash, and the attackers crowding to the rail.

At this point the Kraken seemed to lose interest. While Ailsa had been creating the moment, its whole mass had glimmered with a network of the streaking lines, but now these mostly died. At the same time her own mind went dull. If she had gone on to tell it, about her dive to reach the lovers, she would have had to do so with ordinary, fuzzy, gappy memory. The brilliance of full recall was gone. That was something that the Kraken had summoned from her, much as it had summoned the inner light from her jewels. As the tendrils withdrew from the back of her head, she felt a vague sense of loss. It crossed her mind that the Kraken would now take her into itself too. She was too numb, too exhausted, to be frightened by the idea.

As she waited for whatever would happen next, she became aware of the cold, and the pressure. Even merfolk, used to the chill and weight of water, cannot survive long at such depths. Soon, she thought dully, I shall be dead. I’m sorry for father—first mother, now me.

A brief command came into her mind. She held out both hands and the Kraken placed something in each. She recognised the feel of the rope in her right palm, but not the hard, small, sharp-cornered thing around which her left hand closed.

Another command said Go, so she lashed with her tail and rose, hauling the sleds behind her. They came so easily that she supposed that the Kraken had loosed all the ropes and sent her back with the sleds empty, but when light began to glimmer round her and she could look back, she saw that the lovers’ bodies were still there. The woman’s hair was floating loose, so the Kraken had taken even the little mother-of-pearl combs that had held it in place.

Then the scouts, patrolling the edge of darkness, found her. Conches called, and the blue-fin came surging down, driven so hard that the cavity bubbles streamed in their wake. Hands took the rope from hers, her father grasped her in one arm and wheeled his blue-fin and surged with her up into the warm and golden waters where she belonged. From there the funeral party rode hallooing home, and the mountain emptied to greet them.

They dreamed of green shadowy light, of wave-lap, of half-heard voices. Their heartbeats quickened.

Ailsa gazed at the dark jewel, the Kraken’s gift. It was more than black, beyond black. It was beyond cold—that is to say that it did not feel chill to the touch, but this wasn’t because it was at the same temperature as the touching hand. Instead, contact made the hand aware of the soft warmth of living flesh, its own warmth. So with light. The jewel was faceted and polished like one of Ailsa’s jewels, but no light shone back from any of its surfaces. Instead it sucked light into itself, calling it out of other things. If she took an emerald and placed it beside the black jewel, the emerald, which before had merely refracted the light from the phosphorescent corals that roofed the room, now blazed intensely green, blazed as a star does with its own generated light.

Looking at the black jewel, Ailsa knew that it was as close as she would ever come to understanding the Kraken’s world, that world in which cold and darkness were life, and heat and light were what Councillor Hormos had called “utterly other.”

“I’m sorry about Mother’s jewels,” she said.

“They’re nothing. I thought I had given my daughter to try to save the mountain.”

They were in one of his private rooms, where they had supped together, something that she had never done alone with him before. The walls and floor were strewn with treasures. (Since merfolk do not walk, floors are as good a place as walls for pretty things.) All of them, jewels and coral and gold and mother-of-pearl and amber, seemed alive in the black jewel’s presence, sending out their different lights in answer to its call.

And not only the jewels. Ailsa picked up the Kraken’s gift and cradled it in her palm. Though it was no broader than the base of her middle finger, she could see that inside it the darkness went on for ever. Now she herself felt the same summoning call, and she answered. Answered willingly. Let something—the thing that made her Ailsa and no one else—be drawn into that darkness, let it close around her.

Yes, it went on for ever, before, behind, above, below. There was nothing else, anywhere. But it wasn’t frightening. It had shape, structure, life, meaning, not in any ways she could understand—it was too other. But she was sure they were there.