The Changeling Sea

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Lyo,” she whispered, “what are we going to do?” But there was no answer from the sleeping magician.

  Eight

  THEN THE SEA, missing its gold, perhaps, began to play tricks on the fishers. Enin told the first tale, coming in late on a spring evening with Tull Olney dragging behind him. Enin was soaking wet, his face pale, his eyes bloodshot from salt water. He stood at the bar, dripping on the floor, downing beer as if to wash salt out of his throat. Tull, as bedraggled as Enin, looked, Mare said later, as if he had been slapped silly by a dead cod. Peri, coming up from the kitchens with a warm loaf of bread wrapped in her skirt, stopped short on the top of the stairs when Tull said, “There is something going on in the sea.”

  “There’s something going on in your head,” Enin said brusquely. “I’ll have another beer.”

  “You heard the singing!”

  “I heard somebody blowing a conch. That’s all.” He turned to the fishers and the innkeeper, and Mare, who had slipped in at the sound of his voice. “Tull and I were fishing close by each other. He says he heard singing, I say a conch shell. It was near sundown, the sea was milky-blue under a sweet south wind. I heard a conch—”

  “Singing,” Tull muttered into his beer.

  “It was that deep, foggy sound. A conch, like they use up in the north villages to call all the fishers together. I heard a splash, and there was Tull, leaping out of his boat to swim with his boots on after a seal!”

  “It wasn’t a seal!”

  “I called out to him, he never answered, just swam on. Then the seal dove under, and Tull was left floundering in the water with his fishing boots filling up. So guess who got to leap in after him?” He downed half his second glass and glared at Tull. Peri, watching him with her mouth open, saw something frightened behind the glower. Tull banged his own glass onto the bar.

  “It was singing! And it was a woman!”

  “It was a seal! A white seal—”

  “It was a white-haired woman, with—”

  “With brown eyes.”

  “With brown eyes.” Tull looked around the silent room, his own eyes round, stunned. “She sang. She was a small, pretty thing, white as shell, playing in the water as if she had been born in it. She flicked water at me, laughing, and then…there I was. Like Enin said. Jumping into the deep sea as careless as if I were a seal myself.” He shuddered. “She vanished, left me hanging there in the empty ocean. Her singing…it was like singing out of a dream I wanted to find my way into. I started trying to drink the sea, then, and Enin pulled me out.”

  The fishers stared at him, lamplight washing over their still faces. Somebody snickered. Ami dropped her face in her arms, whimpering with laughter.

  “A seal. You prawn-eyed loon, leaping into the deep sea to frolic with a seal!”

  “It wasn’t a seal!”

  “Next it’ll be the King of the Sea himself blowing his conch in your ear.”

  “I almost drowned,” Tull said indignantly, but by then everyone was laughing too hard to listen to him.

  Peri, hugging the warm loaf to her for comfort, left quickly, passing Mare in the doorway, staring at Enin and Tull without a glimmer of a smile on her face.

  Next, it was Bel and Ami who came in late, quarreling bitterly over a lost net. Something, it transpired, had come up in their haul that Ami refused to pull in.

  “It was an old dead hammerhead,” Bel said disgustedly.

  “It was a boy!” Ami wailed. “A luminous, shiny green-white mer-boy, caught in the net among all the fish. I thought he was dead, but he opened his eyes and smiled at me.”

  “She let go of the net. It was so heavy I couldn’t hold it,” Bel said. “Heavy as if someone were beneath, pulling it down. Ami was screeching in my face. I had to let go finally to shake her. A mer-boy, my left ear. It was nothing but a dead shark. Now we need a new net.”

  In the next week or so, half the fishers hauled in a tale along with their day’s catch, and nobody was laughing anymore. One fisher had nearly rammed his boat against rocks, trying to join a pair of lovely sirens drying their long hair in the sun. Another, beckoned by a vague figure in a strange boat toward a wondrous school of fish, rowed dangerously far out to sea, only to watch the strange boat flounder and sink, as it had many years before. There were tales of hoary, tentacled, kelp-bedecked sea monsters, and of great ghostly ships from some forgotten past rising silently out of the water to sail right through the fishing boats like some icy, briny fog. The fishers’ catch dwindled; the innkeeper had trouble keeping beer in stock. Worse, the summer visitors had caught wind of the tales and were passing them gleefully along to one another.

  “We’ll be the laughing stock of the island,” Enin said glumly, leaning on a doorpost and watching the girls work. “Soon we’ll be too frightened to stick our bare feet in the surf, let alone leave the harbor.”

  “They want their gold back,” Mare said soberly.

  “We haven’t got it!”

  “I know.”

  “That chowderhead mage turned it into flowers.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, what are we supposed to do?”

  Mare stopped shoveling ashes out of the hearth. “I think you’d better find that magician before whatever is in the sea drives you onto land for good. But,” she added, shoveling furiously again, “since you never paid any attention to me before—”

  “Now, Mare,” Enin said, coughing at the cloud she raised.

  “It’s not likely any of you will have enough sense to now.”

  “Where would he have got to, do you think?”

  “You found him before, you can find him again.”

  Enin sighed. “We’ll be a laughingstock.”

  “So? Who in this village is laughing anymore?”

  Was it the gold, Peri wondered as she walked back that evening? Or was it the king’s son the sea wanted back, chained again, not knowing any human language? He would come that night; he came every night. She was getting used to waking in the dark to his gentle voice saying unexpected things. She felt a chill down her back, though the air was balmy. The sea was troubling the fishers now. How long would it be before it found its way to her door? Lyo had freed the sea-dragon from the gold chain, but not from the sea. He could not live on land any more than his half-brother could live in water. Who could help them? Where was Lyo? Where were any answers for either of them? She stopped midstep in the sand, feeling too helpless and worried to think any longer; she could only shout hopelessly as loud as she could, in frustration, expecting no answer.

  “Lyo!”

  “What?” he said beside her. Her shout turned into a scream; she seemed to levitate before his eyes. He bent quickly to pick up the mussels she had dropped. She came back down to earth finally and glared at his shaking shoulders.

  “Lyo, where have you been?”

  “Here.” His voice sounded constrained; he had to duck away from her again, while a sound like geese arguing came out of him.

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Why didn’t you call me before?”

  “How should I know you would come?”

  “I’m sorry—” He straightened finally, wiping his eyes. “You looked so—all your hair went straight for a moment, like a giant hedgehog. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It did not.” But she was smiling then, too, at the sound of his cheerful voice and at his secret, dancing eyes. She held out her skirt; he dropped the mussels back into it.

  “Lyo, something is happening in the sea,” she said.

  “I know. I’ve been hearing the tales.”

  “Have you seen anything, when you’re with the sea-dragon?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the sea-dragon the sea wants back.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “What else could have upset it? The fishers think it’s happening because they tried to steal the gold.”

  “So.” His mouth curled up at one corner. “Now th
ey want me to put the chain back on.”

  “But if you do that—”

  “I’m not going to.”

  “But if you don’t, the fishers will be frightened out of the sea. They have to make a living.”

  “I know.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  He tugged his hair into spikes, smiling at her again. Then his eyes strayed to the sea idling between the spires. “Well. We know that paths exist between land and sea. Kir’s mother found one. I have spent some time searching for a way for humans to reach that country beneath the sea.”

  “Walk there?” she breathed, appalled and fascinated at the same time.

  “People do. Sometimes. But not easily, and sometimes at an extraordinary price. Time passes differently in the undersea; humans can lose years, memories, loves, other things they value. Getting back is even more difficult.”

  “Oh.” She sighed slowly. “Then what—”

  “The only thing I can think of that might help is to talk to Kir’s mother.”

  Peri looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “His mother.”

  “She stole the king’s human son, she chained him, she bore the king’s sea-child. Maybe she is responsible for the things happening to the fishers. Maybe she is trying to speak to the king that way, sending him a message, making him pay attention to the sea.”

  “Except that he’s not here.”

  “But we are. We’re listening.”

  “Would she want to talk to you?”

  “Us.”

  “You. She has never even talked to Kir.”

  “Sometimes people get so angry they can’t hear anything beyond their anger.”

  “Who is she angry at?”

  “The king.”

  “Still? After all these years?”

  “I suppose she still loves him.”

  “How can she love him and be so angry with him at the same time?” Peri asked, bewilderedly.

  “It happens often,” Lyo said. He stopped to pick up an agate in his lean, quick fingers and look through it at the sun. “Love and anger are like land and sea: They meet at many different places. The king has two sons. One he knows, the other he doesn’t. It’s about time he met his wife’s true child.”

  “But he only looks human for a couple of hours every night. The rest of the time he looks like a sea-dragon. You can’t row the king out to sea and introduce him to a sea-dragon.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then—” Her voice faltered. “Well, then, how can you—Lyo, no.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “No.” She gripped his arm, pleading. “No. Please, no. You can’t bring the king to my house.”

  “Peri, he has to know that he has another son. And if we don’t do something soon, the fishers will be driven entirely out of the sea. Or else the sea-dragon will be chained again, so deeply that he will be lost forever. Were you thinking you could just teach him enough language so that he could find his own way to his father’s house?”

  Peri shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said numbly. “I wasn’t thinking. But who knows when Kir and the king will be back?”

  “Kir still doesn’t know he has a brother?”

  “He left just before the sea-dragon changed. He never guessed that part of the story.”

  Lyo grunted, thinking. “You tell him when he returns. I’ll tell the king.”

  Peri stared at him. “You aren’t afraid? You’ll walk into his house and tell him he has a secret son in the shape of a sea-dragon living in the sea?”

  Lyo shrugged imperturbably. “Someone has to. Three people know: you, me, and Kir’s mother. That leaves me.”

  The next day and the next brought in more tales from the sea: of something coming alive in a net, wrapping caressing arms around a fisherman’s neck and nearly pulling him under the water; of a strange cloud that swallowed two or three boats on a cloudless day. Fog-blind, lost, they drifted aimlessly for hours, hearing bells ring, occasional laughter, sometimes a sweet, astonishing harping, faint and light as a sudden patter of rain beyond the cloud. The boats came out of the cloud near nightfall, without a fish in their holds, and so far from the harbor it took them until midnight to get back. All the fishers were looking haunted; they sent messages traveling up and down the coast, pleading for the return of the magician.

  “It’s all the old stories out of the sea coming alive,” Mare said wonderingly, as they put mops and brushes and dust cloths away at the end of the day. “I wonder who it was we offended, making all that gold disappear.”

  “And we never got so much as a coin out of it,” Carey sighed. “It’s not fair. The magician probably stole it. He probably picked all the flowers out of the water and turned them into gold again. He won’t come back.”

  “Ah, don’t say that. He’s our only hope.”

  “Maybe. Maybe the king can do something when he comes back.”

  “What could he do? Even if he believed the fishers? I can’t see him jumping out of his great ship with his boots on to swim after a seal. He watches the waves from his fine house; he sails from land to land on his ship; the only fish he sees are covered with sauce on his plate. What does he know about the sea?”

  “Something,” Peri muttered without thinking.

  “What?”

  She tugged at her hair until it fell over her eyes. “I said something. Maybe that’s what he can do. Maybe.”

  There was a storm that night. Dark, swollen clouds gathered at the horizon at sunset, moved inland fast. Peri heard rain thump on the roof as she cooked supper. In the middle of the night, she woke to the crash of thunder, and she got up to watch the sea-dragon tumble in on the wild waves. The sea washed him out more quickly than usual; he was drenched with rain by the time he reached Peri’s door.

  She threw blankets over him; he stood in front of the fire, his teeth chattering. Then, as he drank the hot broth she gave him, gradually he began to speak. The storm had not upset him, she realized; to him it was just another form of water.

  “I saw a boat,” he said.

  “A boat?” she repeated, horrified. “A fishing boat? In that storm?”

  He shook his head, flicked water out of his bright hair with one hand. “Not boat. The word is too small. Bigger than a boat. After the sun went down. Far away. I swam so far the land was thin.”

  “A ship!”

  “A ship,” he agreed. “In the rain. I swam with it listening to the voices.”

  “It’s a rough night for a ship to be out,” Peri said. She was frowning, her arms folded tightly, protectively; she was nervous at what she wanted to say to him. He put his hand to her face suddenly, where her brows were trying to meet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What? Oh—” Her brows jumped apart again. “I was frowning. That’s a frown.”

  He tried it, his hand still touching her face. Then he laughed. He said, watching her closely when she didn’t laugh, “Your face is talking. I can’t hear it.”

  She held herself more tightly, drew a breath. “When you—when you swim in the sea, do you have a name?”

  He was very still then; his hand dropped. His eyes left her face, went to the fire. He drew the blankets more closely about him. When she realized he would not, or could not, answer, she tried again.

  “Who put the chain around you?”

  Still he didn’t answer. He kept his eyes on the fire, as if he were listening to its voice. She said softly, her brows puckered worriedly, “This is the world you belong in. Not the sea. You belong here, in this world of air and fire, you were born to walk on this land. All the words above the sea belong to you. Tell me. If you can. If you remember. Who chained you to the sea?”

  He looked at her finally. Fire-streaked tears ran down his face; he made no sound. She swallowed, reaching out to him, touching him. He lifted one hand after a moment, brushed it across his cheek and stared down at it.

  “What am I doing?”

  “Crying,
” she whispered. “You are crying tears. Sea-children don’t cry.”

  “Tears.”

  “You are sad.” She put her hand on her heart. “Here. What made you cry?”

  He looked down at the fire again, seeing in its drifting, eddying flames a land she could not imagine. “I don’t have the words,” he said softly. “You teach me.”

  “What—what words do you need?”

  “All the words,” he said, “under the sea.”

  Perplexed, she stopped on the beach the next evening and summoned the magician from whatever secret place he kept himself. She had caught him in the middle of a bite; he offered her a piece of his bread and cheese while he finished chewing.

  “Lyo,” she said, her mouth full.

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you when you’re not here?”

  “Oh.” He swallowed, waved a hand inland. “There’s a bit of forest beyond the gorse…What is it?”

  “I need something.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Something with words in it.”

  “A book?” he suggested. She frowned at him dubiously. He asked delicately, trying not to smile, “Can you read?”

  “Of course I can read,” she said witheringly. “Everyone can. It’s just that after you learn how, it’s not something you do.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not in this village, anyway. My mother has a book she presses flowers in. But it’s not what I need.”

  “What—”

  “I need something for the sea-dragon. Lyo, my house is too small; there are no more words in it. He wants to tell me something about the land under the sea, but he doesn’t know the words, and I can’t teach him, because I don’t know what he’s seeing.”

  “Ah,” Lyo said, illuminated. Then his thoughts went away from her; his eyes grew blue-black, absent. “But,” he said, coming back, “you must be very careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the book.”

  “What book?”

  “Tut,” he said. “Pay attention, Periwinkle. The spell book. Don’t read it, just look at the pictures. They should help you. Promise you won’t try to work the spells.”