The Changeling Sea

by Patricia A. Mckillip

“Come to think of it,” the fishers asked one another, “who did make that chain?”

  Lands were invented on distant islands, at the bottom of the sea, or even floating upon the surface of the sea.

  “Like the kelp islands, you see. Only they can skim the surface faster than a gull, and fade like light fades on the water, leaving no trace. Beautiful, rich, great floating islands of pearl and coral and gold…The sea people keep the sea-monster the way a child keeps a pet. It’s chained to the invisible island.”

  “It’s not a pet. It’s someone who did an evil deed, or crossed a wicked mage, and got chained to the sea bottom in punishment.”

  “It wants to be free then.”

  “It wants us to break the chain.”

  “Suppose we did. Will this wicked mage let us take his gold?”

  “Ah, we should get the gold first and worry later.”

  Peri, working her mop desultorily, found herself daydreaming. Distant isles on the top of the world, past the glaciers and icebergs, past the winter lands, beyond winter itself, gleamed like summer light in her head. Magical isles, where fruit was forever ripe and sweet, and the warm air smelled of roses. Lands deep in the sea, where entire cities were made of pearls, and men and women wore garments of fish scales that floated about them in soft, silvery clouds. One of them had fashioned a chain of gold for a very special…

  “Mare,” she said abruptly.

  “What?”

  “Why do people do things?”

  “Why? For as many reasons as there are fish in the sea.”

  “I mean, if you made a chain for a sea-dragon, would it be because you loved it and didn’t want it freed? Or because you hated it and took away its freedom? Or because you were afraid of it?”

  “Any one of those things. Why?”

  “I was just wondering…was it love or hate or fear that made a chain like that?”

  Mare looked surprised; Peri rarely used such complicated words. “I don’t know. But the way they’re talking in there, I think we’ll soon find out.”

  Walking home wearily that afternoon, Peri searched the horizon for one hint of light in the monotonous gray of sea and sky. Rain flicked against her eyes; she pulled the hood of her cloak more closely about her face. Nothing but the slick, mute fish could possibly dwell in that sea, she decided. There were no wondrous deep-sea lands full of castles made of pearl and whalebone. No free-floating islands of perpetual summer. The sea-dragon’s chain was nothing more than a ring of kelp that glowed with tiny, gold, phosphorescent sea animals. The sea-dragon itself had probably strayed from warm, distant waters where, in its own sea, it wasn’t a monster. That was all. No mystery. Nothing strange, everything explained—

  And there it was, beyond the spires, rising up out of the stormy waters, bright as flame, with the sunlight itself looped around its neck.

  It was watching the only movement on the beach: Peri.

  She stopped, her mouth open. It lingered, massive and curious, its bright streamers swirling in the restless water. The delicate brow fins over its great eyes flicked up and down like eyebrows. It had a mustache of thin streamers above its mouth. It washed to and fro in the water, its eyes like twin red suns hovering above the sea. It seemed to wash closer with the tide. Peri stepped back nervously and bumped into something that snorted gently between her shoulder blades.

  She whirled, gasping. Kir’s black mount whuffed at her again. Kir, never taking his eyes from the sea-dragon, held out his hand.

  “Come up.”

  She stepped onto his boot, hoisted herself awkwardly behind him. He said nothing else, just sat there watching the sea-dragon, his eyes narrowed against the rain. It seemed to watch them as intently, all its fins and long streamers roiling to keep its balance in the storm.

  And then it was gone, sliding fishlike back into its secret world.

  Peri felt Kir draw a soundless breath. Then he lifted the reins, nudged his horse into a sudden gallop. Peri clutched wildly at him. He started under her touch, and slowed quickly.

  “I’m sorry—I forgot you were there.”

  “I’ll walk home,” Peri suggested breathlessly.

  “I’ll take you.” But he rode slowly in the hard rain, his face turned always toward the sea.

  “What is it?” Peri asked again. “Where does the chain begin?”

  For a long moment he didn’t answer; she began to feel like a barnacle talking to the rock it was attached to. Then he answered her. “I think,” he said, so softly she had to strain through the sound of the wind and the waves to hear him, “it begins in my father’s heart.”

  Peri felt herself go brittle, like a dried starfish. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. Then she felt Kir shudder in her arms, and she could move again, the thoughts in her head as vague and elusive as shapes in deep water.

  “There is a land under the sea.”

  “There must be,” he whispered.

  “That’s what you look for, when you watch the sea.”

  “Yes.”

  “The way to get there. Where you—where you want to be.”

  “No one,” he whispered. “No one knows this but you.”

  She swallowed drily, her voice gone again. Unguided, the horse had stopped; rain gusted over them. Kir’s face lifted to the touch of water.

  “It’s why we came here early this year. I am not able, any longer, to be too far from the sea. My father—he thinks—I let him believe that I’ve lost my heart to some lord’s daughter who lives near here. He doesn’t suspect that I would give my heart to anyone who would show me the path to that secret country beneath the waves.”

  “But how—” Peri said huskily.

  “Oh, Peri, do I have to spell it out to you? Are you that innocent?”

  She thought a moment. Then she nodded, her face chilled as from inside, from a cold that had nothing to do with the rain. “I must be.”

  “My father took a lover out of the sea.”

  “A lover,” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  “The king did.” She thought of the lock of his gray hair, falling into the water. “That sounds cold.”

  “She bore me and gave me to him.”

  “Then he does know about you.”

  “No. He doesn’t.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said numbly.

  “I didn’t, either, for a long time…Even in the middle of this island, at the farthest point from the sea, I hear the tide, I know when it changes. I dream of the sea, I want to breathe it like air, I want to wear it like skin. But my father said my mother was a lady of the North Isles, with golden hair and a sweet voice, and that she bore me and died…But how could she have had a son who wants to trade places with every fish he sees? I don’t know where her son is. But I am not hers. My mother is tide, is pearl, is all the darkness and the shining in the sea…”

  A wave roared and broke; a lacework of foam unrolled across the sand almost to the horse’s hooves. It withdrew before it touched them; the prince watched it recede. Peri felt herself shivering uncontrollably. Kir made a small sound, remembering her again. He gathered the reins; within minutes Peri was at her door.

  She slid down; Kir’s eyes were on her face for once, instead of the sea. “I’ll come again,” he told her, inarguable as tide, and she nodded, speechless but relieved that he was not going to leave her alone with this magical and frightening tale. She looked up at him finally, when he didn’t ride away, and saw a sudden, strange relief in his own eyes. He left her then; she watched him until the sea mist swallowed him.

  She was so quiet the next day at the inn that Mare said in amazement, “Peri, you look as if you’re trying to swallow a thought or choke on it. Are you in love?”

  Peri stared at her as if she were speaking a peculiar language. “I’m catching cold,” she mumbled, for something to say. “All this rain. I stood in it yesterday watching the sea-dragon.”

  “You saw it?” Carey’s voice squealed. “Why didn’t you tell us
?”

  “I forgot.”

  “You forgot!” She hugged her wet scrub brush anxiously. “Is it true, then? About the gold? It wasn’t a dream?”

  “It’s real.”

  “Is it dangerous?” Mare asked worriedly. “Would it attack the boats?”

  Peri shook her head, shoving her bucket forward. “It seems friendly.”

  “Friendly!”

  “Well, it seems to like watching people.”

  “That’s what Enin said, that it likes listening to the fishers talk. He says it pokes its big head out of the water and listens, while the gulls land on it and pick at the little fish caught in its streamers.”

  “I bet it wouldn’t miss that chain,” Carey murmured.

  “Yes, but how could they possibly get it off?” Mare said. “It sounds enormous. Whoever put it on meant it to stay.”

  “But they have to get it off!” Carey protested. “They have to! We’ll all be rich! If it was put on, then it can be taken off.”

  Peri ducked over her work, thinking of Kir watching the cold, tantalizing waves, of the great chain disappearing down, down into a secret place. “Magic,” she said, and was surprised at the sound of her voice.

  Carey stared at her, openmouthed. “What’s magic?”

  “The chain. It must be.”

  “You mean wizards and spells, things like that?”

  Mare straightened slowly, blinking at Peri. “You’re right. You must be.” A door slammed within the inn; she picked up the hearth brush again. “If magic put it on, then magic must take it off.”

  “It’s not magic,” the innkeeper said testily, poking his head into the room, “that does your work for you, as much as you may wish it.” All their brooms and dust cloths moved again, to the beat of his footsteps down the hall. The front door opened; a wet wind gusted across the threshold. Carey groaned.

  “I just mopped out there.”

  “Mare,” Enin said, in the doorway. Mare gave him a halfhearted smile. “Working hard?”

  “Go away.”

  “No, don’t!” Carey cried, halting him as he turned. “Peri, tell him what you said. About the magic. Peri said the chain is magic, so Mare said you must take it off with magic.”

  “And where,” Enin asked, “do we find magic? Among the codfish in our nets?”

  “Find someone who does magic. There are people who can.”

  He rubbed his beard silently, blinking at Carey as she knelt among the suds. They had all stopped working, brushes suspended.

  “A mage,” he said. “A wizard.”

  “Yes!”

  “We could offer gold. There’s enough of it.”

  “Yes.”

  “With that kind of payment, we could get a good mage. The best. Someone who could break that chain and keep it from falling back down to the bottom of the sea.”

  “Someone who could keep you from killing yourselves over that gold,” Mare said tartly.

  His eyes moved to her. “Well,” he admitted, “we have been a little carried away. But if you could see it, Mare, if you could—”

  Peri shook her hair out of her eyes, suddenly uneasy. “Maybe you shouldn’t,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t what?”

  “Disturb what’s under the sea. Maybe the chain begins in a dangerous place.”

  They looked at her silently a moment, envisioning, amid the sea of suds, dangerous beginnings. Then Carey cried, “Oh, Peri, there’s nothing to be afraid of!” The door opened again, slammed. Heavy boots stamped into the hall. Enin turned his head, cheerful again.

  “Ami! We’re going to get that gold!”

  “How?”

  “We’re going to hire a magician!”

  Magicians, Peri thought, huddling in her cloak as she walked down the beach. Kings. Sea-dragons. How, she wondered, had such words come to live in her head among plain familiar words like fish stew and scrub bucket? She wiped rain out of her eyes. Gulls sailed the wind over her head, crying mournfully. Her fingers were almost numb in the cold. She carried mussels the innkeeper had given her bundled in a corner of her cloak. The cloak was beginning to smell like old seaweed. As soon as the rains stopped, she would…

  She heard hoofbeats and peered into the rain. A riderless horse galloped down the beach toward her. Against the dusky sky, she could not see its eyes, just its black, black head and body, like a piece of polished night. There was a long strand of kelp caught on one hoof. It passed her; the tide ran in and out of its path.

  She made a wordless noise. And then she began to run, not knowing exactly why or where. The darkening world seemed of only two colors: the deep gray of sky and stone and water, and the misty white of foam and gulls’ wings. The mussels scattered as she ran. The wind whipped her hood back, tugged her hair loose. She saw the old woman’s house finally; there was no fire in its windows, the door was closed. She slowed, her eyes searching the beach. She saw a streak of black in the tide, half in, half out of the sea. She ran again.

  It was Kir, face down in the sand. She dropped to her knees beside him, rolled him onto his back. His face looked ghostly; she couldn’t hear him breathe. She gripped both his hands and rose, trying to tug him out of the encroaching grip of the tide. She pulled once, twice. His clothes were weighted with water and sand; she could barely move him. She shifted her grip to his wrists and gave a mighty tug. He pulled against her, coming alive. Sea water spilled out of his mouth. She let him go; he curled onto his side, his body heaving for air. The rasping, grating breaths he took turned suddenly into sobbing. She felt her body prick with shock; her own eyes grew wide with unshed tears.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she heard him cry. “I don’t know what to do. What must I do? I belong to the sea and it will not let me in, and I cannot bear this land and it will not let me go.”

  “Oh,” Peri whispered; hot tears slid down her face. “Oh.” She knelt beside him again, put her arms around his back and shoulders, held him tightly, awkwardly. She felt the grit of sand in his hair against her cheek, smelled the sea in his clothing. The tide boiled up around them, ebbed slowly. “There must be a way, there must be, we’ll find it,” she said, hardly listening to herself. “I’ll help you find the path into the sea, I promise, I promise…”

  She felt him quiet against her. He turned slowly, shakily, on his knees to face her. He put his arms around her wearily, his hands twined in her hair, his chilled face against her face. He did not speak again; he held her until the tide roared around them, between them, forcing them to choose between land and sea, to go, or stay forever.

  Five

  ENIN AND TULL WERE ABSENT from the sea and the inn for several days. The other fishers, whose hours on the water were intermittent and dangerous, told one another tales of other, wilder storms they had survived and of the strangest things they had ever pulled up from the bottom of the sea. Now and then, as Peri passed them, she heard a brief mention of magic, of wizardry, followed by a sudden silence, as if they were all envisioning, over their beers, the wondrous, powerful mage whom Enin and Tull were at that very moment enticing out of the city. There was no more talk of gold now, lest the word seep under the door into the curious, greedy ears of the visitors. The fishers, gold within their grasp, waited.

  Then, for a while, the village was overrun with some very peculiar people. Carey counted fourteen jugglers, six fortunetellers, nine would-be alchemists who, she said tartly, couldn’t even make change for a gold coin, four inept witches, and any number of tattered, impoverished wizards who couldn’t unlatch a door by magic, let alone unlink a chain. The fishers gave them a dour reception; they, in their turn, saw no sign of gold or dragon in the bitter, tossing sea, and jeered the fishers for drunken dreamers. They all trailed back to the city; the fishers slumped over their beers, mocking Enin and Tull for their thick-headedness and still seeing their fortunes glittering somewhere beyond the spindrift.

  Peri, lost so deeply in her own thoughts, had barely noticed the motley crowd from the city,
except when she dodged a juggler’s ball or tripped over a witch’s skinny familiar. On the morning the storm finally passed, she barely noticed the silence. She scrubbed at an unfamiliar patch of sunlight as if it were one more puddle to clean off the flagstones. She was trying to imagine the world beneath the sea that Kir yearned for so desperately. Where could he have got to, that night, if he had found entry to the sea’s cold heart? What would he change into? A creature of water and pearl, son of the restless tide…She scowled, scrubbing away at memories: his hands in her hair, the chill kiss on her cheek, his need of her, someone human to hold.

  On land, at least she could touch him.

  “Peri,” Mare said, and Peri, startled, came up out of layer upon layer of thought. “You’ve been working on the same spot for twenty minutes. Are you trying to scrub through to the other side of the world?”

  “Oh.” She pushed her bucket and herself forward automatically. Mare, her feet in the way, did not move.

  “Are you all right, girl?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You’re so quiet lately.”

  “I’m all right,” Peri said. Mare still didn’t move.

  “Growing pains,” she decided finally, and her feet walked out of eyesight. “You finish the hall, then help me upstairs when you’re done.”

  Peri grunted, shoved her bucket farther down the hall. The frown crept back over her face. The wave of suds she sent across the floor turned into tide and foam.

  There was a sudden crash. The inn door, with someone clinging to it, had blown open under a vigorous puff of spring wind. Peri looked up to see a stranger lose his balance on her tide. He danced upright a moment, and she noticed finally the blazing thunderheads and the bright blue sky beyond him. Then he tossed his arms and fell, slid down the hall to kick over her bucket before he washed to a halt under her astonished face.

  They stared at one another, nose to nose. The stranger lay prone, panting slightly. Peri, wordless, sat back on her knees, her brush, suspended, dripping on the stranger’s hair.

  The stranger smiled after a moment. He was a small, dark-haired, wiry young man with skin the light polished brown of a hazelnut. His eyes were very odd: a vivid blue-green-gray, like stones glittering different colors under the sun. He turned on his side on the wet floor and cupped his chin in his palm.