Along the Saltwise Sea

by A. Deborah Baker

  “Everyone comfortable?” asked Niamh. “Have a good grip? Excellent.” She looked to the edge of the well, where the single crow to have made the trip back up to the surface was sitting. “If you would be so kind,” she said.

  The crow hopped onto the crank that allowed the bucket to be raised and lowered, and, with one steady kick, sent it spinning, and sent the bucket, with all three passengers, plummeting down into the darkness.

  Zib squealed. Niamh laughed. Avery screamed. And those reactions tell you everything there is to know about those three children in that single, frozen moment.

  Then the bucket hit the surface of the water with a splash, and everything was silence. With a caw that was virtually a laugh, the crow tucked its wings in against its body and plummeted after the others, down into the darkness of the well.

  THREE

  WHERE BRAMBLES STEAL THE SKY

  Niamh tumbled out of the bucket when it hit the water, drifting downward with her eyes open and her arms spread wide. When she was so far below the surface that she could no longer see the moment when the small bubbles trickling from her nose reached the air and rejoined it, she took a deep breath, filling her belly and lungs with water, and began to swim leisurely toward the dim light above her.

  She broke the surface and spat a jet of water into the air, as elegant and untroubled as a stone fountain. Avery and Zib, who were still clinging to the bucket’s edge, shrieked in unified surprise. Niamh offered them a lazy smile and spat another stream of water.

  “You said the rope wouldn’t break!” shouted Avery.

  “It didn’t break,” said Niamh. “The Crow Girl turned the crank.”

  Avery and Zib looked around, their eyes adjusting to the new darkness. The stone walls around them were covered in crows, their talons clamping down on every little jut and jag in the rock. Their eyes were bright and glittering in the dim light.

  “You told her to. Why?” asked Zib. “You had to know we’d fall.”

  “Yes, but this is water, and I’m stronger in the water,” said Niamh. “You were saying you wanted to stop and rest. Where better to rest than at the bottom of a well?”

  “I can think of a lot of places,” said Avery. “Sunshine places. Dry places.”

  “I wouldn’t like to rest in a desert,” said Zib dubiously.

  “I never said anything about a desert!”

  “But deserts are dry, sunshine places,” said Zib, in a tone which implied Avery was being unreasonable. “I’m so tired and sore right now that being in the water seems like about the best thing that could happen.” And with that, she pushed herself off the edge of the bucket and joined Niamh in the well with a quiet splash. Shivering, she leaned back to float. “It would be nice if the water were just a little bit warmer, though.”

  “Cold well water is one of life’s sweetest pleasures,” said Niamh. “It wouldn’t be nice to everyone else if we warmed up the well.”

  “But we’re already swimming in the well,” said Zib. “How is that nice to everyone else? If they pull the bucket back up, they’ll get Avery, and Zib-flavored water. I don’t think they want either of those things.”

  “All will be well, if you’ll excuse the pun,” said Niamh patiently. “Avery, come in the water. It’s nice here.”

  “I’d rather stay dry,” said Avery, looking at the dark water with mistrust.

  Zib laughed, splashing at him. “Only you would think you could stay dry at the bottom of a well,” she said. “Wells aren’t where you go to stay dry, not unless a drought is happening, and when there’s a drought, everything is bad. There’s no drought happening here.”

  Avery started to answer, and then froze, paling, as the bucket rocked violently beneath him. “Stop kicking the bucket,” he said.

  Zib blinked. “What?”

  “I said, stop kicking the bucket. I don’t like it, it’s not funny, and friends shouldn’t do things just to be mean.” The bucket rocked even more violently. Avery clutched the handle, glaring at Zib. “I asked you to stop!”

  “You didn’t ask, you told, and I’m not doing anything!” said Zib. She held her hands up in illustration, dipping lower in the water. “I wouldn’t!”

  Avery frowned, and switched his suspicious gaze to Niamh, who was drifting in the water on the other side of the well, out of reach of the bucket. Again, he started to speak.

  This time he was interrupted by the bucket—Avery and all—being jerked abruptly under the water, leaving only a flurry of bubbles behind. Zib jerked upright, splashing and flailing as she tried to find some trace of him in the dark well.

  “Avery?” she exclaimed. “Avery, where are you?”

  The crows on the walls began to croak and caw, creating a jolly ruckus that bounced back and forth between the stone and the water, until it was so loud it was almost deafening. Under the circumstances, it was understandable when Zib failed to notice Niamh vanishing below the water, dragged down by something unseen.

  The crows continued to call as Zib looked frantically around. They called louder when something wrapped around her ankles and jerked downward, hauling her into the drenched, freezing darkness.

  The water calmed in the absence of an upset, thrashing girl. The crows continued to yell. Then they pulled themselves together, becoming another girl, this one longer of limb and dressed in black feathers. The Crow Girl dropped into the well with the force of a flung stone.

  She didn’t surface again.

  Beneath the water, Zib was yanked along, mouth open in a silent scream and trailing bubbles. Niamh was visible a little bit ahead of her, pale, waterlogged skin seeming to almost glow in the dimness. No bubbles trailed from her mouth or nose. She might as well have been a corpse, carried along by the current. Avery, who had been the first taken, was entirely out of view.

  Down and down and down they traveled, helpless against the force that had ensnared them, until they broke through the bottom of the aquifer, a shimmering, pearlescent veil of liquid, and into open air. Zib gasped, choking out the water in her lungs even as she greedily replaced it with air. Niamh weathered the transition without visible distress. They plummeted toward the ground, which was covered in a writhing mass of fleshy green fronds that smelled of salt and sunlight. Avery was already there, pillowed by the green, not moving.

  The pair struck down. The Crow Girl came tumbling after them, narrowly managing not to land on Zib. She squawked and spat water before turning to the human child and asking, “Did you pull me down?”

  “No,” rasped Zib, in a voice as waterlogged as a kitchen sponge on cleaning day. “I think the plant did that.” She indicated the writhing green mass beneath them. It wasn’t grabbing or pulling anymore, or trying to eat them. That was enough of an improvement that she didn’t want to question it, not really.

  Niamh crawled over to Avery, who was sprawled alongside the remains of the bucket. The rope had snapped at some point during his descent, and its frayed end rested on his chest, like a tether to nowhere. Reaching out, she gingerly shook his shoulder.

  “Peace, Avery,” she said. “I know drowning, and you’re not drowned. Open your eyes and come back where you belong.”

  Avery remained still and silent for several seconds more before he coughed, water coming out of his mouth, sat up, and vomited into the bucket. He took a great, shuddering breath, leaned over the bucket, and vomited again.

  “That’s surprisingly tidy of you,” said Niamh, in an approving tone. “Never throw up on anyone you haven’t been introduced to. I would normally suggest not sitting on anyone you haven’t been introduced to, either, but it’s a bit late for that, and since this charming individual tried to drown us all, it seems like a little sitting-on is simply tit for tat.”

  “Individual?” asked Avery blearily.

  Several of the nearest green fronds lifted up and waved gingerly in the air, for all the world like the fingers of a vast hand folding over themselves. Avery screamed.

  Zib jerked around to face him, and
followed his scream with one of her own, much higher and shriller. The Crow Girl burst into birds, all of them cawing loudly and frantically as they flew around the cavern. Avery kept screaming, and so did Zib. Niamh rolled her eyes.

  “Screaming isn’t going to help or change anything,” she said. “No matter how loud you get, the facts remain the same. I’ve never encountered noise-soluble facts, although I suppose they must exist. If someone has a headache, and you scream in their ear, the fact is that their headache may get worse, and you may get punched, very hard.”

  They, and the green thing, were in what looked like a natural cave carved out of the side of a vast stone outcropping. The walls were remarkably smooth, offering no real perches for the crows now whirling through the air. The ceiling, the parts of it that weren’t a rainbow-wrapped wall of water, was made of the same stone, and was equally smooth. Only the ground differed, consisting of wide patches of glittering sand between the green fronds.

  The fronds were still waving frantically, although it was difficult to say whether or not that had anything to do with all the screaming. Zib climbed to her feet and went stomping barefoot through the green to Avery’s side, spreading her arms as if posture would help her to scream even louder. A dozen or so crows came to roost on her, cawing and flapping their wings. Zib kept screaming, but she didn’t sound alarmed anymore. She was almost smiling, and seemed to be screaming for the sake of making a big and increasingly joyous noise.

  Avery stopped screaming and clutched his ears. “Stop, stop, stop,” he wailed.

  Zib stopped screaming. The crows stopped cawing. Not all at once; it took a while for the ones who were whirling around the cavern to realize that the sound was dying out, and close their beaks accordingly. But the ones on her arms stopped quickly, and the silence spread out from there, like the ringing of an unhearable bell.

  “Where are we?” demanded Avery, lowering his hands and turning toward Niamh.

  “Well, this is helpful kelp,” said Niamh, nudging the green thing with her toe. “It grows along the beaches of the Saltwise Sea. I’ve always thought it was so helpful because it’s a border creature, and all border creatures know, on some level, that they belong to the Forest of Borders, which is a helpful place.”

  Avery, who remembered the Forest of Borders all too well and had his own opinions about how helpful it was, said nothing.

  Zib waded through the fronds, arms still held up for the crows, and asked, “How was it helpful for the kelp to drag us all that way underwater? We could have drowned!”

  “Not all of us,” said Niamh patiently. “I couldn’t have drowned, even if I’d been trying my very hardest. Drowning is like being born; you can only really do it the once. Any time you try after that, you might manage a parody of the first time, but you’ll never actually do it.”

  “I’m not a drowned girl,” said Zib, tone going irritable. She finally shook the crows off her arms, and they all came together a few feet away, consolidating into the form of the Crow Girl. Zib put her hands on her hips. “The owls speak riddles,” she said. “You’re not one of the owls. You’re supposed to be our friend. So tell us what’s going on, and why we’re here, and why it was worth losing the improbable road.”

  The improbable road can always be found again by travelers in the Up-and-Under. It’s improbable that a road should be accessible no matter where someone is standing, and any improbability in the Up-and-Under feeds into the road’s design. Perhaps that was why Niamh looked at Zib, and sighed, before saying, with the utmost patience, “It’s not lost. It’s just not here right now.” She paused before adding thoughtfully, “We’re lost. The road is exactly where it needs to be.”

  Zib stared at her. The Crow Girl cleared her throat before asking, “If it’s help-kelp, why did it grab us before? We didn’t need any help.”

  “Ah, but maybe it thought we did,” said Niamh. “Most people don’t seek shelter in the bottom of wells, after all.”

  “So it thought we were in trouble?” asked Zib. “How can a plant think anything? Plants don’t have brains.”

  “And roads can’t move, and flocks of crows can’t become girls when they want to enjoy the luxury of thumbs,” said Niamh. “You need to break your addiction to the idea that anything is impossible. Things don’t have to be possible to be true.”

  Zib was fairly sure that “not true, not real” was part of the definition of “impossible,” but Niamh was right: she had seen so many impossible things since falling into the Up-and-Under that it was silly for her to start drawing arbitrary lines now. “I’m sorry, Mr. Kelp,” she said, stepping off the fronds and leaning down to give one a gentle pat. “We weren’t in any trouble, but you didn’t know that, and you didn’t drown any of us, not really. As long as you don’t do that again, we can be friends.”

  A few fronds lifted carefully into the air. One of them stroked Zib’s hair. She laughed.

  Avery finally let go of the bucket. Niamh wrinkled her nose and picked it up, moving it away from the helpful kelp, which had already been through enough and didn’t really need to be doused in someone else’s sick. Not when it had only been trying to help. This was a form of compassion on her part, and while it may have been somewhat misplaced, it was in no way misguided. The two things are not always the same, however much some people may make them out to be.

  The Crow Girl, shivering in the dim cave and her wet feathers, looked around as she rubbed her arms, and asked, “Can the help-kelp help us out of here? I don’t think we can go back up through the well.”

  “No, probably not,” agreed Niamh, looking at the pearlescent water hanging above them. Of the four, she was the best suited to such a journey, and even she failed to find any real appeal in it. Upward through an aquifer was an adventure unto itself, and only she could breathe underwater. “We’re here now, I suppose. We should go and find out where here is.”

  The kelp gathered itself, pulling away from the sand and out from under their feet and twisting into a single tall column that resembled nothing as much as it did a tree. It pointed deeper into the cave with all of its kelp-frond “branches.”

  “Is that the way out?” asked Zib.

  The “tree” shivered in what looked like agreement before untwisting and falling back to the sandy ground.

  “Can we really trust a pile of seaweed?” asked Avery.

  “Do we have a choice?” countered Zib. “At least my feet don’t hurt anymore. Come on! Let’s see where we are!” And she started walking, in the direction the kelp had indicated. Niamh and the Crow Girl followed, until the three of them were walking off across the sand and Avery was standing alone with the help-kelp, which sprawled motionless around him.

  “Don’t leave me here!” shouted Avery.

  Niamh turned, walking backward as she said, “And why shouldn’t we? None of us want to be here anymore, and you haven’t suggested anything better than finding the exit from this cave. Help-kelp wouldn’t send us off to be devoured by some monster in the shadows. That isn’t in its nature. We’re going outside. Come or stay, that’s up to you.”

  Avery frowned at her, trying to imitate the powerful frown he’d seen his father wear when something wasn’t going the way he wanted it to. Niamh looked back at him, unperturbed. With a sigh, he stepped away from the kelp and ran after the others, feet slapping against the sand. Niamh nodded to him.

  “See? Sometimes it’s better to go and see what can be seen than it is to stay exactly where you are.”

  “Just because you outnumber me, that doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do,” he said.

  Niamh blinked. “I didn’t tell you what to do. Hepzibah did, a little bit, when she told you to come on, but no one made you listen. No one can make you do anything. No one except for you. But if we can’t tell you what to do, that means you can’t tell us what to do, either. That’s what fairness looks like. We don’t make your choices, and you don’t make ours.”

  “But … but you’re bullying me into
going along with what you want,” said Avery.

  “No,” said Niamh. “We’re not. We’re just leaving. You can leave with us, or you can be alone without us. That isn’t bullying. Now, we could bully you, but this isn’t what bullying looks like. This is just what leaving looks like.”

  Avery frowned again, thoughtfully this time, and not like a frown was the quiet second side of a fist. He kept walking, the sand cool between his toes, and thought about what Niamh had said. As an only child, he had had plenty of time to get used to the idea of being outnumbered by his parents, who decided almost everything according to majority rule, and who had raised him to be a biddable child. When the two of them together wanted something, well, that was what was going to happen, and it didn’t matter if he wanted it at all!

  But this wasn’t like that, because his friends had been happy to leave him behind if that was what he wanted to do. Their unwillingness to yield to his desires in what was, really, a fairly straightforward situation, with only two choices at hand, wasn’t the same as his mother telling him what to wear so they could go see his grandmother, who didn’t like him very much and always smelled, in a subtle but undeniable way, of sour milk and cod. This was more akin to his mother declaring that she was going to go see his grandmother, but he was welcome to stay home if he preferred, keeping himself company with his books and building blocks and thoughts.

  He found he liked this better.

  Avery didn’t have much experience with making friends. The other children at his school had a tendency to think of him as too boring and straitlaced to be worth playing with, and he had never pressed the issue, preferring the company of teachers and the librarian, none of whom wanted him to run around and get dirty the way the other children did.

  Well, he was learning about getting dirty now! The Up-and-Under seemed to have a particular dislike of his being clean. He had been bathed in mud and dropped in sand and doused and frozen and lost the shine out of his shoes before losing the shoes themselves. And in a place like this one, he was direly afraid that losing the shine meant more than it would have back at home, where shoe polish existed for sale in every general shop. Here, the loss seemed strangely permanent, like something that should have been considered much more carefully.