by Ron Miller
The catman immediately began stripping off his clothing. Bronwyn was amused and interested to see that his body was not only covered with a fine, grey down, but that it showed faint black stripes as well. When he turned away, there was also, she was surprised to see, a tail that he must have had tucked down one leg of his trousers. How adorable, she thought irrelevantly.
When Captain Wow saw that the others were not emulating his example, he urged them to do so without wasting even another second.
“Why?” asked Rykkla. “Where have we got to go? I thought that we were going to find a boat here or something.”
“I think that I know what’s going to happen,” replied Bronwyn. “But he’s right, there’s no time to waste. Just trust him and do what he says.”
“I suppose I’ll trust him if you do,” said Rykkla, a little doubtfully. “But I can’t imagine what either of you have in mind.”
They were all of them in any case virtually soaked to the skin from the flying spray and spindrift. A strong wind had come up, an ambitious wind that was giving every sign of bettering itself. Wild-looking breakers were beating against the ineffectual barrier reef with a kind of desperate frenzy and their roar drowned out that of the volcano. Wet in any case, they all threw their sodden clothing to the rocks and stood shivering in the gusting, spray-filled air. With only a single, satisfied look over his shoulder, Captain Wow dived from the edge of the rock, slipping into the surging water like a needle into cloth. Bronwyn followed him as far as the brink, then turned to her friends. “You’ve got to trust me,” she said. “It’s going to be all right. It’s the only thing that we can do and I could never explain it to you in time.”
“Hell,” said Rykkla, who strode up to where the princess stood, posed neatly and dived into the sea like the practiced athlete she was. Thud followed immediately, jumping off the brink gracelessly and hitting the water like a bomb. Wittenoom held his nose and hopped off feet first, then Gyven stood beside the princess.
“I thought that I’d never see you again,” he said.
“And I didn’t think that I wanted to see you again. Where the hell have you been?”
“I can explain . . . ”
“The hell you think you can!” she said, kissed him full on the lips, then broke away suddenly and dived off the rock with almost the same grace demonstrated by Rykkla. She didn’t look back to see whether Gyven followed or not.
The water was cold and dark. The others were hovering near the princess, imbedded in the murky green like insects in amber, if there were amber the color of bottle glass; circling around them, like a sheepdog herding its charges, was an enormous fish with bulging eyes and dangling tendrils surrounding its wide, sad-looking mouth. Bronwyn knew immediately, perhaps by the evident sense of relief in the fish’s soulful expression, that this was Captain Wow in his natural state.
She was amazed, if not entirely surprised, to see that the others were already equipped with the same sort of slender, sinuous tails that she herself had possessed so recently. So was she again, she realized, without having been aware of any transition. Sithcundman is becoming quite practiced at this. Showing off, she shot through the cluster of neomerpeople like a barracuda, like a swallow teasing a flock of lumbering pigeons, like a torpedo through a fleet of dinghies. Captain Wow suddenly appeared before her face, bringing her to an abrupt and clumsy halt, his dour face glowering at her disapprovingly before turning toward the dark obscurity that marked the presence of the reef. Bronwyn followed the big fish docilely, with the others not far behind. She was glad that she was ahead of the group; her exhibition and the silent remonstrance that had followed embarrassed her and she knew that if she faced her friends that she would have to cover up with indignation and perhaps even anger.
The catfish led the others through the convoluted passageways within the reef, finally emerging into the open sea beyond. Still the catfish continued, driving an unswerving course away from the island.
An hour or more passed and Bronwyn was exhausted; even the easy, semiautomatic propulsion had finally sapped her reserves of energy, both physical and psychic. The catfish had not paused for rest or consultation since leaving the reef, nor had Bronwyn noticed even so much as a minnow, krill or diatom; the ocean seemed devoid of life.
Just as the princess had decided to take a rest, regardless of whether the others continued or not, she saw a vague shadow in the olive murkiness ahead. I should have remembered! she chided herself. It’s the little islet where I met the mermaids. And it was indeed that very same pile of rocks. She swam with the others up to its black flanks and pushed her head above the black, surging waves, circling the islet until she found the place where she could pull herself out of the water. This she did with considerable less clumsiness than before and mounted the rock high enough to allow the others room to clamber and flop behind her.
They were all as obviously as exhausted as she was, and collapsed, panting, like fish out of water. They make splendid-looking merpeople, she thought charitably, even Wittenoom, whose elongated wiriness made him resemble an iron-grey moray eel. Rykkla’s caudal appendage was like blued steel with pewter-colored fins. Bronwyn admired, if a little ruefully, the girl’s lean, sleekly-muscled body that rippled like a bundle of ropes even as she lay there exhausted, supported by one arm while the other brushed her black hair from where it plastered her lean face.
Thud, as always, amazed her. She had never grown accustomed to his continuing transformation and stared at her old friend with astonishment and admiration. His once amorphously spherical body was still massive, but was now as firm and landscaped with muscle as a young planet. Water trickled in tentative rivulets through and across the plains, mountains and valleys of that virgin world. From where she was positioned, his round head looked like a glistening moon rising above the planet’s horizon. He had a relatively short tail, a light blue-grey in color, with thick, broad flukes and looked, if anything, more like a walrus or manatee than a fish.
Gyven as always was an enigma. She had never loved anyone so much, nor had been disappointed by anyone so deeply. She had felt that disappointment developing into hatred; worse, it was transmogrifying into disinterest. In fact, she had been trying to achieve that emotional transformation herself, whether or not she would ever overtly admit to it, which of course she would not. But hating Gyven would have put the burden of responsibility and, if she ever permitted it, reparation squarely on his broad shoulders. But what had been Gyven’s greatest fault? It was that he had not lived up to the expectations she had set for him. She had decided, arbitrarily enough, that he was her best friend, she had decided that he was her lover, her confidant, her companion, her husband-to-be . . . but Gyven himself had made few, if any, of these promises to her, or had done little to warrant the attachment of these ideals. In reality, she had made him the instrumentality if not the victim of her own needs, desires and feelings. She had felt the deepest yearnings for his companionship and because his company was all-important to her she called him her best friend, even though she was doing little else than transposing her own emotions. Still, the fiction, the illusion it created, the sound of it when she told herself, or told others, “He’s my best friend,” or “He’s my lover,” was a necessary reinforcement. Unfortunately, the more often she said such things, the more she came to believe in their instrinsic, independent truth. When the inevitable time came when Gyven had to do something that was not what a best friend or lover would have done, she blamed him for not being the Gyven she had created. It wasn’t entirely fair, some responsible part of her brain argued, to fault people for not living up to the standards and expectations we’ve arbitrarily set for them. So what? the rest of her brain would reply.
But was he, all that time, in truth her friend and lover? Perhaps. Perhaps what Bronwyn thought could happen by decree had in fact happened as it should have, naturally and in the course of time. Perhaps not.
Whatever animosities she had felt about him in the past months, or had c
onvinced herself she had felt, she saw dissolving as she watched his long, hard body pulling itself up onto the glistening black rocks. All of the prison--like pallor of the first year she had known him was gone; he was as brown as a terra cotta sculpture, his muscles looking like flexible slabs of clay thrown onto his framework by a daring and impatient artist, having all the power, vitality and potential of the preliminary sketch before it suffers under the blurring imposition of afterthoughts and refinement. His long tail was silver on the lower side and almost black on the upper, the fins as long and sharp as a pair of shears.
He pushed his hair away from his face and looked up at the princess with eyes like black pearls. His face looked as though it had been sliced from a block of red clay with only a dozen daring strokes of that insane artist’s knife.
Whatever Bronwyn had resolved to say to him, she found melting away, as elusive of her grasp as the water that streamed from her hair. I can’t lose him, she decided. Whatever I do, however I feel, whatever I want to say, whatever he’s done or I think he’s done, I cannot lose him. I’ll forgive him anything, I’ll forgive myself, just so I don’t lose him, not again.
“Look!” cried Wittenoom, and all of their heads turned in time to see the island erupt. It blossomed like some vast, black flower, splitting open, unfolding, its somber petals revealing the brilliant red that had been hidden inside. A few seconds later the sound of the explosion reached them: a subsonic thump that was more a visceral blow than a sound.
“I suppose,” said Rykkla, “we owe you some explanation of what we’re doing here.”
“I had wondered,” admitted Bronwyn.
“I met Gyven while looking for Thud, who had disappeared into a meteor crater. The Kobolds he was with wouldn’t let me leave unless I was able to convince the faeries to stop making the moon fall . . . ”
“The faeries? It was Doctor Tudela.”
“You and I know that now, but the Kobolds didn’t. It was partly true, in any case, because it was the faeries who gave him the idea in the first place and gave him the gold to finance his experiment.”
“The faeries commissioned Tudela to make the moon fall?”
“Yes, but he double-crossed them, you know. In any case, I convinced the Kobolds that though there was no longer anything to fear from the faeries . . . ”
“Which faeries?” Bronwyn interrupted. “Spikenard’s or the ones that I helped to bring over from Soccotara?”
“Those. Hod Tawley’s. As I was saying, I told King Slagelse (who sends you his best wishes, by the way) who was behind the coming catastrophe and he sent us all here. Or over there, rather,” she finished, pointing to what remained of the island.
Bronwyn was about to protest that Tamlaght was several thousand miles away, but recalled that distances within the Kobold world were quite different than those outside it. Instead, she asked, “Did the Kobolds have anything to do with the eruption and earthquake?”
“I’m not sure, Slagelse did comment that the island’s foundations were as shaky as Tudela’s. Whatever that meant.”
“Well, I personally have no doubt about it, since the king’d be capable of it. Thud or Gyven’d know if anyone would, I suppose. And speaking of whom: why was Gyven with you?”
“I think that Gyven can explain that better than I can.”
“Probably,” he agreed. “I had been contacted by the Kobolds during an inspection of a mine. Needless to say, I was surprised, since I had not only not heard anything at all from them since the incident at Strabane, but these Kobolds were of a subkingdom living beneath Soccotara and I would have thought it unthinkable that such far-flung groups would have maintained such detailed contact. As long as I had lived with them, I had always believed the individual Kobold nations to be distinct and remote. I suppose that it was the nature of their problem that encouraged this unprecedented unity. In any event, they asked for my assistance since I was their only liaison with the surface world, but only under the condition that I swear to absolute secrecy. You can imagine the quandary in which this placed me, but I realized finally that I had little choice.”
“Thank you very much,” said Bronwyn angrily. “You couldn’t even tell me why you were going to disappear! What do you think I am? A newspaper? A telegraph? Did you think that I was going to spread what you told me all over the continent?”
“Well, of course not, but . . . ”
“ . . . you didn’t trust me,” she completed.
“That’s not it at all . . . ”
“What else it could it be? You abandoned me, you left me to think that you’d run off to Musrum knows where, Musrum knows why. For all I knew you were dead.”
“I assumed you’d understand . . . ”
“You’re dead on about that! I understood all right, but I don’t think that I understood what you thought I understood. How was I supposed to understand whatever you expected me to understand when I didn’t understand anything?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You damn well better hope that you are.”
“Ahem,” sounded Wittenoom, “I trust that we are not forgetting Doctor Tudela.”
“What about Tudela?” snapped the princess.
“Well, I was just thinking that his fate is altogether too ambiguous to make me feel absolutely comfortable. I realize that being cast away in a free balloon in the middle of the Great Sea, with the nearest nonmolten land of any consequence thousands of miles away, does not bode well for one’s continued existence. But we must not be oversanguine and underestimate Tudela’s resourcefulness.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere!” protested Bronwyn. “It wouldn’t be possible for a balloon to stay aloft nearly long enough for him to reach land! Would it?”
“I suppose not, though aerostatics is a little outside of my field. But what about his relief ship?”
“His what?”
“The ship that appeared periodically to check for his signal. I would imagine that the eruption of the volcano was a pretty definite signal, if not necessarily the one agreed upon or expected.”
“I forgot about the ship!”
“Yes, so had I. But it isn’t beyond reason to suppose that it might have rescued the doctor.”
“That ship, do you think?” asked Rykkla, who was nearest the summit of the islet and was pointing out to sea. The others stretched or craned or twisted, as required, to see where she was looking. There was indeed a ship steaming rapidly along the horizon, away from the island. Although she had no real reason for thinking so, Bronwyn was certain that it was the same vessel she had seen before. She had some reason for her certitude, in all fairness, since there were virtually no shipping lanes across the vast, watery desert that constituted the Great Sea, an unrelieved expanse more than twelve thousand miles wide and extending from pole to pole, something on the order of 114 million square miles of unrelieved liquid. It was infinitely easier, simpler and certainly less depressing to circumnavigate the continents than to commit oneself to such appalling loneliness. Therefore, if there were any ships at all to be found in the midst of the Great Sea, they must be there for a special purpose, and a ship with a special purpose so providentially near to Skupshtina Island could with some cause be assumed to have a connection with the island’s activities.
Therefore Bronwyn cried, “That’s his ship, Professor! Tudela must be on it!”
“What can we do?” asked Gyven, but the princess ignored him.
“What can we do?” she asked Wittenoom.
“Nothing at the moment,” he replied. “It’s going to be dark too soon for us to do anything.”
“Look!” Rykkla repeated, “it’s coming closer!”
It was indeed. Bronwyn, who admittedly had sharper eyes than most, could already make out cobwebby rigging. There were no sails; the ship was making way on steam alone and a long plume of smoke trailed behind.
“Do you think they can see us?” she asked.
“I doubt it,” replied Gyven, taking advantage of th
e fact that her question had been unaddressed, ignoring her attempt to ignore him. “Most of us, in any case, except Rykkla up there, are on the wrong side of the rock.”
“Maybe,” offered Thud, “you’d better come down, Rykkla.”
The girl agreed and lowered herself until just her head would have been visible from the approaching ship.
“Look here!” said the professor, “I’ve found some eggs! Is anyone hungry?”
He had located a cluster of nests belonging to gulls and sea mews and had already gathered a dozen large eggs. Bronwyn, reminded that she was, indeed, very hungry, took advantage of her position nearest the waterline to look for mussels and immediately found an abundance of bivalves hidden among the slippery sea wrack. Thud, clumsily flopping across the slimy rocks like a monster walrus, came to help her harvest the shellfish. Very soon they were able to spread two or three dozen mollusks onto the shelf they were using for a table, where they joined the professor’s eggs. These they had to eat by carefully punching small holes in the ends and sucking out the contents. The taste was terrible (Wittenoom was a better taxinomist than naturalist) and after eating only a few they turned to the shellfish, most of which had opened of their own accord. They ate them as they would oysters, but the strong, peppery taste, at first very agreeable, soon made them regret the absence of fresh water.
Dusk fell quickly, perhaps due to the cloud of ash which had spread from horizon to horizon, from the now nearly quiescent volcano, and the sunset was uncannily lurid. Rykkla, resuming her position as lookout, reported that the ship had anchored not more than three or four miles distant. She could see its lights clearly and even swore that she could hear indistinct voices.
Brownyn clumsily eeled her way to a point just below that occupied by Rykkla.
“Rykkla,” she asked, “you were really in the Baudad Alcatotes’s harem?”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?”
“It was all right. Something like a spa for ladies only, I suppose.”
