Walking on Water

by Matthew J. Metzger

  Calla knew, with a fierce certainty, that she had to know the rest.

  Chapter Six

  “DRINK.”

  Janez accepted the steaming cup. It was filth, but it was hot. He drank it down, hacked, and coughed up another mouthful of dirty seawater.

  “In the bucket, if you please. Sawdust hardly grows on trees.”

  “Oh, but it does, Doktor,” Janez croaked and smiled benignly at the foul look cast his way.

  “If you prefer the butchery of the harbour hacksaws, then by all means, seek your medicine with them,” Doktor Hauser said. “Open.”

  Janez permitted the stick that shoved his tongue down, and the affronted hum. Sometimes, Janez suspected, Hauser was more put out by those who dared to be healthy than those who dared to be sick.

  “I am quite fine, Doktor. Just cold.”

  “You are lucky to have survived. Your greatcoat and boots saved you.”

  “A sailor saved me,” Janez said, and the doctor harrumphed.

  “Yes, the great swimming saviour, I was told.”

  “I must thank him.”

  “If you can find him. The hands that brought you up said he swam off the moment they had you.”

  “To save more unfortunate souls, no doubt,” Janez creaked. He hacked again, but obediently coughed the salt up into the bucket, this time. “He must have seen me go over the edge.”

  “If he went back for another, he’ll have frozen to death by now,” Hauser said and then sighed in an extremely put-upon manner when a fist hammered on the door. “Those blasted sentries! My orders mean nothing—don’t you dare!” he added in a thunderous growl when Janez cast the coverlet back.

  The door cracked open. “Doktor?”

  “Away!” Hauser snarled, his rasping voice—usually so quiet and whispery, so understated and almost sulky—raised in a great cawing shout, like an affronted raven. “Away, lest I kill this maddening idiot prince for his own safety!”

  Luckily for Hauser, the royal family fondly tolerated his temper. He had served them for most of his life, so the queen entered with little more than a benign smile and kind eyes for her brother-in-law.

  “Dear Janez,” she said. “Do let Doktor work.”

  “Doktor is fussing,” Janez protested and yowled when a sharp prod was delivered to his bandaged thigh.

  “Doktor can flush you with fouler tinctures than a warming brew,” came the waspish warning.

  Queen Sofia simply smiled, her skirts rustling as she seated herself in the chair by the bed. She was the picture of composure—the very definition of beauty. Yet under the divinity ran a streak of something a little more bloodthirsty, something that echoed from the depths of a more brutal, warlike past, of their forebears pillaging the seas, man and woman alike, and terrorising the known world.

  And she showed it in her soft voice saying, “The enemy are burning.”

  “It was sunk? The Vogel? The Ente?”

  “Both safe. They have not yet returned to shore, but they can be seen.”

  Janez threw back the coverlet again. “I must—”

  He was felled not by Doktor Hauser, but by Sofia, who calmly plucked a pin from her perfectly coiled hair, and jammed it down onto the dressing around his thigh.

  “My lady, I have rarely had the pleasure of a woman so level-headed and sensible in the art of medicine,” Hauser said—and followed it up by roughly thrusting Janez back into the pillows and handing him a cup full of dark liquid that fizzed ominously. “Drink.”

  “What will it do to me?”

  “If I had my way, kill you, and rid me of this impertinent child of a patient.”

  “But what will it do?” Janez persisted.

  “Dull the pain.”

  Janez set it aside. “The pain is not so—”

  “If the pain is not sufficient, I will increase it until it is,” Hauser said, and Janez picked up the cup again.

  “The guards said you were brought ashore by a sailor?” the queen asked as Janez drank, and when he’d drained the vessel, he nodded. “He must be thanked. What was his name?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Janez confessed. “I was half out of my mind.”

  Hauser’s eyes narrowed. “Did you drown?”

  “I don’t know. One moment, I was staring at the belly of the beast—and remind me, Doktor, Vogel needs her bottom scraped again—”

  “I cannot think of anything more urgent,” came the dry reply.

  “—and the next, I was on a bit of driftwood and being shoved up onto the rocks at the point.”

  “Well, you must have recognised him, if he was from the Vogel.”

  “He wasn’t. Perhaps the Ente. I fell from that side, you know, from the enemy ship. We’d boarded. And the Ente is packed with those western hands—he was a foreigner, anyway. Didn’t understand when I told him to stay, muttered some gibberish, and then he was gone.”

  “Could have been from the enemy frigate,” Hauser said as he applied a foul-smelling paste to the savage graze above Janez’s ear, where a musket ball had missed his brains by mere skin.

  “No,” the queen said. “They would have left him to drown. Well, I hope he is safe, whoever he is. And should you see him again, or recall his face, then we must have him to the palace to be thanked personally.”

  “I would rather pay for his next evening in the taverns,” Janez said and managed—just—to duck the slap his sister-in-law aimed for the back of his head.

  “I think I will leave you to Doktor. Perhaps he can dull your cheek before Alarik comes this evening,” she scolded, and Janez grinned up at her, unrepentant.

  “Come, Sophie. If I weren’t abrasive, Alarik would think something deathly wrong.”

  “If he comes before sunset, you’ll be asleep, and he can satisfy his curiosity without you attempting to undo my hard work,” Hauser said, winding a bandage around Janez’s hair and over the vile paste.

  “Sleep?”

  “Certainly. It is that peaceful thing often done at night, which you neglect so often.”

  “You said the potion was for pain,” Janez said accusingly. Sofia laughed. Hauser grumbled, but a flicker of good humour glowed through the severe countenance.

  “Sleep is an excellent remedy for pain. And I am not a fool. The windows have been locked.”

  Janez protested until there was only one candle left lit, and the great door to his room had been closed with finality behind the doctor. And then he was alone. In the distance—beyond the undeniably awful pounding in his head and the sharp agony in his thigh—he could hear the sounds of a busy harbour drifting up from the sea, and a brewing storm.

  He dozed—though didn’t truly sleep—and the drift in and out of vague consciousness was punctured by strange waking dreams and visitations. Doktor Hauser came and went, his hands and voice soft for once, and great pale eyes under sleek hair so fair it was nearly white peered at him from the end of the bed, a phantom of a memory. He only imagined the fingers to have been webbed like a duck’s feet when he had clutched them. How could—no, no, a dream. He had been shot at, stabbed, and sunk. The hand had been cold and wet and that was all, that was all—

  “Don’t go,” he murmured to the phantom, once or twice, but the hand that squeezed his arm in reply was warm, and Doktor Hauser’s quiet assurance of safety and instruction to sleep so real that it had to be a memory. Such wide eyes, such very wide, wide—

  Outside, the light died.

  When Janez blinked, his mind cloudy with the undeniable fur of a drugged sleep, the curtains had been drawn, and the lanterns lit, their flicker soft in the quiet room. The murmur of voices nearby was low and soothing, and he turned his head towards them to find his brother seated in the chair and looking through one of the doctor’s books. Hauser himself was bent low over the bandaging on Janez’s thigh, and Janez frowned muzzily. Had that much time passed? Or—ah, of course. The blackness.

  “Must you remove it here? The blood will stain the bed.”

  They bot
h jumped at his voice, and then Alarik laughed. It was a welcome sound, and Janez closed his eyes in relaxed contentment at the hand that roughly brushed his hair back from his face and neck.

  “Idiot brother,” came the affectionate reply. “You’ve had worse scrapes falling from trees as a child. It bled. You simply need to be sewn shut.”

  “Oh,” Janez said. He felt a dull tug on his skin and reached out a hand. “Hold it?”

  “How much of the stuff did you give him, Doktor?” The complaint was sour, but the smooth grasp of the king’s fingers slid into his own regardless, and Janez clutched hard.

  The other hand had been—it had been.

  “Webbed.”

  “What?” Alarik asked idly. “Oh, come now, Doktor, you can’t expect me to believe that is what a man’s innards look like?”

  “They were webbed.”

  “It is a perfectly accurate diagram, Your Majesty. I can attest to that myself.”

  “They were webbed, Alarik.”

  “Your Majesty? I beg pardon, Doktor, if I am distracting you…”

  “Who has webbed hands?”

  “You are not. The constant bleating from that mindless lout, however—”

  “Alarik!”

  “What, Janez? They’re only stit—”

  “The sailor. The sailor had webbed hands.”

  Alarik rolled his eyes and shook the hand in his own. “You were semi-conscious and freezing. I’m surprised you could feel any hands at all.”

  “He did,” Janez murmured and heard Alarik sigh. When Janez closed his eyes, the lip of a cup was pressed to his mouth. He pulled back.

  “Drink it, Janez. You’re exhausted. It will help.”

  “The ship—”

  “We took the victory.”

  “My leg.”

  “Your leg will be quite fine in a day or two. It’s your brains I’m a little more concerned about. Drink.”

  “Brains? What brains?”

  Janez opened his mouth to protest Hauser’s remark, but then gasped at the sharp tug of thread in flesh. Sweet wine filled his mouth, and he drank.

  The shadows grew.

  A hand—warm, familiar, and definitely not webbed—soothed the lines from his forehead.

  “Don’t go,” Janez breathed and felt the fingers tap his scalp in reprimand.

  “Not before Doktor is done. Sleep.”

  Janez let go.

  And fell into the dark, cold water, to be caught by wide pale eyes, and webbed hands.

  The last thought that spiralled away below his feet into the fathoms, following the gun that had dragged him into the depths, was so inane that Janez barely grasped it before it slid away again and dissolved into nothingness.

  Who could swim without so much as a splash?

  Chapter Seven

  SHE LAY IN the dark for the longest time.

  It seemed so cold below now that she had touched him. The soft rasp of his fingers, so alien and so alluring…

  Was this what Meri spoke of when she lauded the joy of kisses? Was this what Balta wanted from her suitors? No. How could it be? Mermen did not—could not—have a touch like that.

  Even when Calla stopped floating and began to dive down, away from the shimmering sky and roaring clouds, she could feel his kiss. In her skin, in her veins, in her very blood. It hummed hot and crept around her heart, tight and warm. She had an energy she’d never felt before—she wanted to dive, to twist, to burst through the sky again, but also sink to the deepest, darkest parts of the ocean to cool the heat in her head. Did he have a name? What had been that emotion in his eyes? Did skymen even feel, want, love, the way merfolk did? Oh, but she didn’t even care. Just to lie in the shallows with him, to feel that warm rasp against her face, her hand, her hair…

  She could hardly breathe yet was full of water. She drifted, yet was caught. And the only thing that made sense, the only thing she could think, was that she had to return.

  But the clouds were dangerous, and she couldn’t breathe above the sky. And he had nearly suffocated when the grey creature had dragged him down.

  The knowledge was crushing, and Calla hugged herself tightly, curling up against the cold. She sank, slow and listless, as the thought chased itself around in her head. When he’d kissed her, she’d felt something that would have explained everything. All those feelings of being out of place; all those little thoughts that perhaps there was something wrong with her. When he’d kissed her, when the cold sky had touched her skin and her hair had been heavy about her head, straight like the skyman’s had lain, it had all been right.

  She was meant to be one of them.

  It all fitted into place, tight and secure. Every moment of feeling like some strange traitor, some outsider in her own clan, had been swept away above the sky. She had saved him when she ought to have let him drown. She had kissed him when she ought to have been afraid and repulsed. And she felt right, like that alien touch was familiar, like those blue eyes were home.

  She was meant to be up there.

  With him.

  A bolt of determination struck her, and she untwisted herself and dived straight down. She had proven skymen to be true. The clouds were dangerous beasts that spat fire, and the skymen were gods to bring them down. And she had kissed one. She had kissed one.

  It did not occur to her until the dark seabed rose up, and the waving weeds of the palace gardens brushed her belly, that she would be in trouble. And by then, it was too late. The guards had spied her and called her name, and then Balta was flying out of a window to catch at her in a hard embrace.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I must see Father!” Calla insisted, trying to wriggle free of her sister’s grasp.

  “He’s furious! Everyone’s been out looking for you! You’ve—”

  “Balta!”

  Calla seized her sister’s arms and shook her. Her skin felt smooth and cool, nothing like the skyman’s.

  “They’re real, Balta!”

  “What are?”

  “Skymen!”

  Balta’s elegant face was wreathed in confused uncertainty, and Calla squeezed her tight before letting go, spreading her arms and whirling in pure, unadulterated delight.

  “They’re real!” she repeated. “And we can touch the sky. I’ve been there. I’ve seen them!”

  “That’s—that’s silly, Meri says that’s—”

  “What does Meri know?”

  “She’s oldest,” Balta recited, and Calla scoffed at her.

  “Well, she’s wrong. I saw them!” she repeated. “And Mother was right, they can walk on the water but they can’t breathe here—one of them fell in—you should have seen him, Balta, he was so beautiful…”

  The confusion turned to disgust.

  “How could a creature with crab-legs be beautiful?”

  “They weren’t like crabs at all, they were like—like—oh, I can’t describe them—like arms, but with odd little hands at the bottom, to walk on, and—”

  Balta’s face screwed up in distaste, and Calla abandoned the attempt.

  “Come with me,” she urged. “Come with me, next time.”

  “Next time? Wherever you went—”

  “The sky.”

  “—Father’s furious with you, Calla. There won’t be a next time. And stop telling stories.”

  “It’s not a story!”

  “It must be. Father says it’s impossible for merfolk to touch the sky.”

  “Well, I did.”

  Balta shook her head—and then a cry went up from the courtyard, and Meri was a blur of pale colour as she shot from column to Calla, catching her in an embrace for the first time in years.

  “Where have you been?” she cried, and shook Calla like a naughty merling. “Father is worried sick! I was worried sick! It’s been nearly a day! Where did you go—have you been with someone? You’ve been with someone. Who was it?”

  “It was a—”

  “Don’t!” Balta pleaded.

&nb
sp; “—skyman,” Calla finished stubbornly, and Meri stared.

  “What?”

  “I touched the sky, Meri!”

  “If you don’t want to tell us,” Meri said, “then that’s your concern, Calla, but don’t make up silly lies about the sky. Father will punish you if you tell such stories.”

  “But I can prove it! Come with me—I can show you the clouds, and the shore, and skymen. Meri, there was a skyman, and he was so beautiful and I saved him so he kissed me and—”

  “You’re mad,” Meri said in horror. “You must be mad. That’s—none of that’s real. They’re just bedtime stories.”

  “They are real. I saw them. I—”

  “Calla!”

  The boom was a shock, after the shrill voices of her sisters.

  And it was displeased.

  She turned. Father hovered at the edge of the courtyard, arms folded across his chest. Sternly scowling. Meri was the first to move, drifting back across to him and whispering, and his expression darkened further.

  “Is this true?”

  “I—”

  “Have you been telling stories about the sky?”

  “They’re not stories, Father,” Calla said. Her sisters could be brainless, but Father would listen, if only she could prove it. “I was curious. After the cloud that landed here. So I swam up to the surface.”

  “That’s dangerous and foolish. A king’s daughter should not be—”

  The remark rankled. Calla’s mind jumped to the heavy weight of her hair on her head, above the sky, and how powerful it had felt. How her neck had had to work at keeping her head up. How—masculine. Not the floating, flowing tresses of a mermaid, but the firm coils of a merman—and heavy, above the sky, like her hair had become muscle. How dare he speak to her like that? Who cared what a king’s daughter might do? If she were his son, she would have been granted a complement of guards and sent to find the edge of the world.

  “It doesn’t matter if I should,” she retorted. “I did. That’s what matters. And they’re there. I can show you. Come with me. I can show you, and—”

  “I am disappointed,” Father said with a sorrowful look. Her heart twisted in regret, even as her mind went blank before demanding to know how he could think her a liar. “If you have a suitor, then I expect to be told, Calla. Not be fed silly little lies and—”