“Of all Lok-i-xan’s daughters, only one had the proper genetic structure. Your mother. To beget you, she needed a human male with a certain rare genetic structure. We knew it should be found among the descendants of Huold, and that meant in or near Norland. She went there, she found the duke, together they begot you, and you were X, her precious hope. You are the first one able to create more sea eggs! The people you give them to will change, and if two changers mate with one another, their children will inherit their abilities and their children after them.”
After a lengthy silence, Abasio said, “Two of a certain, very rare kind of people finding one another? That’s leaving it to mere chance! We . . . that is, you should have better odds than that!”
“There must be no odds at all! Xulai must be sure that each fertile sea egg is given to a person like herself. Otherwise, we will have wars beneath the sea, hatred, species-ism, territoriality—who knows what horrors we would have. Your children will be born with the ability; they will pass it to their children.”
Xulai cried, “What ability? I don’t have—”
“We believe you can be a land creature when you wish, you can live beneath the sea when you wish.”
Xulai cried, “No, I—”
Abasio put his hand on her shoulder, silencing her. “Just out of curiosity, what would happen if Xulai gave me one of the things?”
“It would extend your life but it would not make you immortal. Both you and Xulai will live out your lives long before the oceans cover the last mountaintops. But it will give your descendants a new life and that will give us more time to save humanity.”
Xulai cried, “I don’t understand any of this. But . . . but suppose I might give an egg to a woman who is a perfectly lovely woman, but she might marry someone who was a dreadful person, and then their children would be all wrong . . .”
“This difficulty was foreseen. It is all planned for! Once the man or woman has the egg, only the right kind of mate will attract them. As your mother found Justinian, Xulai. Your father has told you. They saw one another; she knew he was the right one.”
Xulai found herself staring at Abasio, wondering if he felt as she did, this feeling of being herded, directed, this uncertainty whether to be relieved or furious. Here they were again, planning her life for her in a way she did not comprehend in the least, and they’d been doing it generations ahead!
The Sea King read her face, or perhaps her mind. “You are not required to do any of this. You can destroy the sea eggs and let all humans die. You can give them to others and let your own grandchildren drown. That would be a pity.” It was said without expression. “However, it is your choice. Lok-i-xan says we may not take away your freedom of choice.”
Xulai was still struggling with the idea. “And I suppose, if I wanted to be absolutely sure, I should let someone check the genetics and approve him. If I wanted to marry someone like . . .”
“Like Abasio, here?”
She flushed. “Purely as an example, yes, suppose I did?”
“Well, the person who sent him to Woldsgard thought he was a likely candidate. Abasio wasn’t the only man he sent to Woldsgard, but he was the only right one. You probably don’t even remember meeting the others. They saw a little girl and were polite, and that was all.”
Abasio saw her face, wavering between fury and curiosity, and pulled her tight against him to keep her from erupting. “Was this sea egg what the Duchess of Altamont wanted to get her hands on?”
The great creature before them coiled and recoiled, expressing distaste, horror, contempt with every curl and twist. “People like that one! I wish we could ignore them. We can’t. Evil must be found before it can be eradicated. We find one, that one leads us to others. As she did.”
“As she did what?”
“She led us to people, places, to an understanding of what was happening. We have certain drylanders who act as our agents. They offer rewards for information, bait for people who will tell us things. This woman wanted power, so we promised her power in return for something we knew she could never find. We said, ‘Find Ghastain’s miraculous amulet, or anything like it, and we will give you power.’ ”
Xulai turned, her anger momentarily forgotten. “What was it? Where was it?”
The Sea King’s great body shook, and Abasio realized he was laughing. “Ghastain’s amulet was a piece of wood with an invitation carved into it. It was from Clan Do-Lok and from the Sea King—I should say Sea Ruler, for at that time it was a female—an invitation to come to Tingawa and talk over the future of all human people. The Sea Ruler sent it by a messenger, or, probably, a whole chain of them. Unfortunately, the Sea Ruler of that time had the message written in Tingawan and did not think to send anyone to translate the message for Ghastain. She did not consider that Ghastain had never lived near the sea, that he would not recognize Tingawan writing. He thought the carved words were magic.”
“But . . . all Ghastain’s victories? His unconquerable army?”
“He had victories, true. And he had failures, also. His victories took him even into the center of the continent where Huold or Huold’s sons begat sons and daughters and where Abasio later lived. And his failures ended his life when his unconquerable army got onto ships and set out for Tingawa. He got as far as he did because he had some good luck and a particularly fine tactician in Huold, who, by the way, strongly advised Ghastain against that armada thing. We could not allow all those ships!”
“It was arrogant,” said Abasio, watching Xulai carefully.
“It was stupid,” Xulai agreed.
The Sea King could not quite nod, but the flexible tentacles marvelously expressed his feeling of agreement. “Ghastain was clever but he was not really intelligent. When Huold got to Ghost Isle—people say riding on a fish, which is not true; half a dozen dolphins and a whale saved him, none of them fish, really—and when he showed the amulet to the people there, someone told him the words were Tingawan. Huold was intelligent, and he found a word book! A Tingawan-Norland dictionary! Below the sea we are now developing a word book! Cephalo-drylander! Ha. No drylander will be able to say the words, but they can hear them if they stick their heads in the water! Huold struggled to work out the meaning. He spent several days sitting on the beach there at Krakenhold. Our stories say he was toasting sausages, writing, eating a sausage, pondering, then writing again. All that time, the Sea Ruler was lying in the fjord, watching and listening.
“The she-kraken saw that Huold could not believe what it said. Over and over he went back to the book, shaking his head as you drylanders do when you are confused. When Huold finally understood, he started laughing and went on laughing until he was weak and had to lie down on the sand. Then, when he recovered, he broke the amulet into pieces and threw them in the sea.”
“Where did he go?”
“He traveled to the mountains above Marish and left his servant there. He himself went down to Marish. Nobody knew who he was. There was a ship readying to sail to Tingawa. Before it sailed he told the people of Marish there was a man lost up on the mountain. When they found the man, he told them the story Huold had given him to tell, that Huold was lost in the mountains. Huold wasn’t lost at all; when he reached Tingawa, he was adopted into Clan Do-Lok. Justinian is also a descendant of that family through Lythany, Huold’s daughter, who began Woldsgard. That’s why the genetics worked out so well.”
Xulai rose, shaking her head, trembling. “I can’t believe this. It’s so . . . it’s not probable! That my father would have said nothing about this! Nothing at all, not a hint. That the princess, my mother, that she wouldn’t have said anything. I don’t suppose anyone else would have known. Not even Precious Wind?”
“Precious Wind knew only a part,” said the Sea King. “Your mother knew a part. Your father, standing behind you so quietly now, is hearing it for the first time. Everyone would have known all about it a generation ago if it had not been for that . . . creature. Precious Wind has already told you the hi
story of the creature. We knew that whenever Tingawan people went into Norland, something dreadful followed them, sometimes killed them. Despite all our protections, it killed your mother. We could not risk it happening to you. Secrecy was absolutely necessary, to protect you. If we could have completed our plan without Tingawans going to Norland, it would have been easier, but we could not. As it was, we took all kinds of precautions against the monster, but we didn’t know he’d created assistants! Just as we did not know about the women he spawned. Just as we did not know of the devices the creature had from the Before Time. We did not know what he was capable of!”
They sat silent for a moment. Xulai moved restlessly. “I still don’t understand about this ‘ability’ you’ve mentioned. I think I understand about the genetics, but not at all about this changing. How is it we change?”
“Come here,” he said. “Come close.”
The words were gentle but they were still a command. Something tiny within her struggled, only for a moment, before she went toward him, the great buttress of him lying there near the waters’ edge, his tentacles spiraling among the stones, his great eyes peering at her, his terrifying beak motionless below though the hypnotic word flowed from it. “Come.”
She went. A tentacle as wide as a tree rose from the sea, the bottom side circled with cups that had a life of their own, gaping and contracting. The tentacle rose over her, curved away, growing smaller as it tapered away, branch sized, then arm sized, then finally the tip, only the size of a finger, delicate as her own, came forward to touch her. It was chilly but not cold. It was wet but not slimy. It stroked her arm and then held her hand, taking the little finger and the ring finger and squeezing them together very softly. “Change,” the Sea King murmured. “Daughter, change.”
Her fingers changed. The bones went out of them. They flexed. Little circles erupted from their bottom sides. Her hand split in two. Dreamily, she remembered this feeling. She had been a tree in a very tight little pot, breaking the pot. It was the feeling she had had in the dungeon, as though her arm had split in two. Her hand split in two with little cups replacing the palm, wrist splitting in two, then the lower arm, elbow, upper arm, shoulder. At the same time her feet and the other arm were also splitting, the separations rising toward her shoulders, and she was becoming eight limbed, each limb lengthening, changing color, turning, spiraling, curving, infinitely flexible. She felt the bones come apart into pieces, tiny pieces, moving aside, encapsulating, staying there but no longer attached to one another, each capsule flexibly joined to the next. The change reached her neck, her head. There was a carapace there. Her eyes moved outward, to the sides, seeing things she had never seen before. She had no nose, but she had something that sensed a smell, things she had never smelled before.
“Come,” he said, tugging gently. “You are homocephalo-sapiens. You are many-legged brain-holding humankind. You are a color changer, shape changer, dweller beneath the sea. And yet you are still humankind, still female, and inside you, in that organ you call an ovary, you are creating more sea eggs.”
Behind her, Abasio pulled every fiber of himself into a tight bundle, wound it with cords of self-control, and made it stand still. Rigid as iron, he saw what she became and how she had become it. The helmet had recorded what Xulai had felt and seen during her imprisonment in the Vulture Tower, yes, but that had been as observed from inside herself. That had been mostly . . . feelings! That he had accepted, how she felt, how she reacted, but the helmet had not shown him what she became, how she became it. Now there was no more mystery about how Jenger had died. Now there was a new, more important mystery, about himself! How would Abasio react to this? His first reaction, rigidly controlled, had been to flee, to refuse to accept, refuse to understand or want to understand. How long did he have before she would come back? How long did he have to talk sense to himself? What form would she come back in? Psychologically wavering helplessly between love and revulsion, mentally trying to make sense of the story he had heard, bodily he stood utterly rigid, a man carved from stone.
Meantime, Xulai had been tugged into the sea, into the shimmer and the curl of the sea, the foam and ripple, the shush and pull, the buoyancy, the bounce, the tremble, the shift, the constant movement and life of the ocean. One of her arms picked up a shell, curled around it, opened it, delivered the contents to her beak. Oyster. Very nice. She had never tasted such freshness. But, but, wasn’t this akin to murder, to killing one’s. . .
“It’s all right,” said the Sea King.
He was speaking. She heard his Tingawan words through the water. The vibrations were felt through her skin. “There are things that think and feel and there are things that don’t. We try not to eat the things that do. Except for certain very evil ones. Those we go after in groups and some eat them with considerable ceremony, but it is not obligatory.”
She thought she nodded. Perhaps she nodded.
The tentacle tugged again. “Swim. See.”
He went ahead of her, huge but buoyant, tentacles trailing, she a tiny copy of him, propelling herself through the waters, a balloon with fringes trailing behind. She caught a tentacle tip around an arm of coral and spun to rest, eyes fastened upon the complexity and glory of the reef, jeweled with thousands of brightly colored fishes, ornamented with corals of myriad shapes, dotted with fringe-shelled clams, swarming with eels, starfish, urchins. A tiny octopus crept from a hole in the reef, its little tentacles like a fringed skirt. It greeted her as a child might greet her on the street. “H’lo. Who’re you?” She introduced herself. The baby giggled and withdrew into its hiding place.
“One of my offspring,” said the Sea King with a certain satisfaction. “The females of our new race come here for sperm packets and sometimes leave their egg packets close by.”
“Sperm . . . ?” Xulai felt herself flushing.
“Our males who have language do it no differently than we cephalopods have always done. Our males have always given a sperm packet to the females.” He chuckled. “Your people call this an ‘arm’s-length transaction.’ We find it sensible. Intelligent! You already know what we think of your way! All that . . .”
“Yes,” said Xulai, not wanting to get into all that. “I know.”
He continued. “Our females store the sperm, sometimes for a season or more. They use it when they have eggs ready, when they have found a safe place to attach them to the seafloor where the young will not be threatened. Of course, as Sea King, I have issued an edict concerning our young. Each creature with a mind knows they are not to touch them. The scientists have given us what they call disincentives. Our babies do not taste good.”
Xulai turned toward him and met the eyes of a dolphin, head and body tilted in the water so it could see her better.
It warbled, in Tingawan, “Is this your drylander daughter, Sea King?”
“It is,” he rumbled.
“Swim well and swiftly, sea daughter,” said the dolphin. “I will tell my people.”
“He speaks our language,” she murmured, watching it swim away. There was something strangely fringed about the flippers. Were those fingers at the edges?
“Those of us Sea People who speak, speak a language we have chosen to speak. We have our own languages as well, but we chose a simplified Tingawan to become the language of the sea. Dryland Tingawan has many more words than are strictly necessary. We are not writing a thesis here. We seek only to communicate!”
Across the bulk of him she saw something very strange. It looked like, it seemed to be . . . “What is that?” she asked, pointing with several tentacles.
He laughed, that deep, interior gurgle. “That is the dolphin’s joke. They said, because I am a king, I must have a castle. The corals grew it for them. Corals don’t talk; I don’t know how the dolphins told the corals what to do, but they grew me a castle! The dolphins had seen castles, here and there, where men live near the coast. When they had built it, the eels liked it very much, so they moved in. So, the Sea King has a castl
e full of eels.”
It was true; the place crawled with them. It actually seemed that one huge eel went up the entire height of the structure, and she had to stare for a moment to realize it was actually a tail at the bottom, several middles of eels at various places in between, and one quite large head at the top.
“I suppose everyone in the sea knows about it,” she said. “Your castle?”
“I suppose,” he said.
“There are people, refugees,” she said. “They say they are refugees from you, Sea King. They live on the great cliff of the highlands of Ghastain. Each of them wears an earring, a tower with what I thought was a snake winding through it.”
“I know. If you look very closely at what they wear, there is a little line of waves at the very top, hardly visible. That tells you the crest is an underwater tower with an eel wound through it. Those people are not refugees from me, Daughter. They take refuge from the sea. Their islands have been drowned, but I did not drown them. They are partly Tingawan, but the islanders have a different culture, a different language. We, Clan Do-Lok and I, asked them to settle there, to be an army, if we ever need an army. Some of our best geneticists are among them. They keep us informed of what is happening. They send messages to Wellsport and the dolphins bring them to Tingawa. They tell us who goes where. We offered them sea eggs in exchange for their help.”
“But there were no sea eggs then.”
“They know that. They live in hope, as we do. The Duchess of Altamont amuses—that is, amused herself with them, or they with her. They have sent messages to tell us she is dead, her mother the queen is dead. King Gahls is alone now. He is not an intelligent man. He will go on having parades while the water rises.”
“Gahls is not alone enough,” she replied. “Rancitor is Mirami’s son. He has evil blood. I’m sure the Tingawans know that. He must not become king.”