He shrugged enormously. “Forget it for a time. For this little time, simply enjoy the sea.”
He went to the castle and she turned aside to admire a marvelous fish. When she turned back, the Sea King had disappeared.
He did not reappear. Disoriented, she turned, turned again, finally called out. “Sea King!” She was looking at the last place she had seen him. And he emerged, there, from the background, laughing at her.
“How did you do that?”
“How did you do it? When you became a little child?”
“Precious Wind told you! I never knew how I did it.”
“You took the color of the thing you wished to be, the color of the background.”
“I was wearing clothes!”
“When you change, you are like water. You can leak through your clothes, tiny bits of you, like needles, holding the color of your background. I cannot do that, but then, I don’t have to.”
“You planned that!”
He laughed. “It was totally unforeseen. Precious Wind said you had done it. It took us a long, long time to figure out how.”
Precious Wind knew about it. Well, let it be; she did not really believe it. It had surprised her at the time, but it had felt much more like a mental thing to her, something she did with her mind, not her body.
Together they explored the coral-flowered, fish-gemmed castle, from its laughably porous dungeons at the bottom to its towers just below the water’s surface, one of which held a flagpole that waved a tiny red seaweed pennant. It was tenanted by great numbers of the Sea King’s children, safe from the eels because they did not taste good. After a time—short or long, she didn’t know—he reached out a tentacle and together they moved back toward the beach. Once there he thrust her toward the sand and moved away. “Change back.” It was only a whisper, but it was a command.
And she did, as she crawled onto the sand. Her head had not split, it had merely become flexible. Bits of skull joined together. Starting at the neck, her body came together and buttoned itself up like a long shirt and pair of trousers, though her real shirt and trousers lay on the sand where she had slipped out of them on her way into the ocean. All the little bits of bone slipped together like the oddly shaped pieces of those sawn puzzles Bear had made for her when she was little, locking together, knitting into solidity. The little subordinate brains up and down the tentacles encapsulated and hid themselves. Her flesh melded. She looked for a seam on her arm and could not find one.
Justinian and Lok-i-xan had turned and walked away when she came from the sea, whether from politeness or some less pleasant feeling, so only Abasio, still rigid as stone, widened his eyes as he saw her dress herself. Her eyes passed over him blindly, as though he were not there. He shivered. Apparently he didn’t exist; she had forgotten the entire world in which he existed.
When she turned toward the sea once again, the Sea King had moved a good way offshore. “Come to the edge of the sea and call my name if you need me,” he said.
“What is your name?”
“Just say you want to talk to your father,” he called, disappearing below the surface of the sea. “Or call for the Sea King.”
“Your father?” Abasio breathed from close behind her. He had had to force himself to approach, even though most of his fear had vanished when she had become Xulai once more. He put aside any contemplation of how he would feel about, how he would deal with, whatever other form she might choose or keep in the future. Let it alone. Don’t think of it. Deal with it, if at all, later on.
Xulai sighed, aware of him. This was Abasio. Yes. Abasio. He was there, steady, calm . . . like her other half. Had he been afraid? She could hear his heart beating, too quickly. He had been afraid. For her, or for himself? For both of them, probably. Of course he had. So had she. She reached behind her to take his hand. She leaned against him.
“All my fathers, Abasio, just think of all my fathers. Justinian is my father. Clan Do-Lok is my father. The Sea King is my father. I probably have a dozen mothers. Generations of them. Hundreds of years of them. Are you frightened, Abasio? I am quite definitely terrified, but I’m so stunned, I can’t feel it yet. I’m afraid I’ll be afraid, dreadfully afraid, when I do.”
He made a shivering sound, a fragile, brittle exclamation that was not quite laughter and not quite a shriek of terror. He made himself put his arms around her and draw her even closer. “Yes, I was . . . am frightened.”
“Do you know why?”
He could not answer immediately. At last he took a deep breath and said, “I decided it was because I thought you might not come back at all, or that you might come back as something else entirely. Which is what you may have done.”
She thought about it. “I worried about that, too, but no. I’m me. I was me even when I wasn’t. It was like getting out of bed and stretching and finding all my bones weren’t necessary, and dealing with that perfectly well while at the same time something inside me was screaming that there was something terribly wrong. It was like one of those dreams where you’re flying, and you know very well if you fall, you’re dead, but the flying is nice, so it’s half terror and half exaltation. You know? Part of me was scared to death, but meantime, the rest of me was just enjoying it. I imagine your frightened part was doing the same thing mine was, but you didn’t feel the other part. Assuming we both have the same parts.”
“Can I do that? Change like that?”
“If I understand what he was saying, evidently all it takes is a sea egg. I gave you one a long time ago. In Merhaven. What did you do with it?”
“I swallowed it. When I was with you in the princess’s bedroom, that first night, I got the very strong feeling your mother wanted me to do what you were doing, so when you gave it to me, I did it on faith, I guess. But I haven’t felt like changing!”
“Well, neither did I feel like changing. Not until I had to. I dreamed it at least twice before I actually did it; then I did it to save my life, there in the Vulture Tower, but I couldn’t remember doing it. Did you get what the Sea King said about Ghastain’s amulet?”
“It was an invitation to join the party.”
“And Huold did! The amulet wouldn’t have done anything for the duchess, even if she’d found it. Before Huold went to Tingawa, though, he left descendants we know nothing about. Some of them, obviously, were in the part of the world where you were raised. One or more of them were your ancestors.”
Abasio considered his mother and his father, the Drowned Woman and the Gang Leader. At least one of them had been a great-great-great-how-many-greats-grandchild of Huold the Heroic? How utterly unlikely that was! “And our part in all this is . . . ?”
“Our part came about because Xu-i-lok was the first woman, the only woman, who would be able to lay the sea eggs after she mated with . . . with someone who had the right genetics. Well, so . . . after she and my father . . . got together, she became pregnant with me and laid the first sea egg. She did it about the same time that . . . creature at Altamont sent her killing cloud! My mother hid it. She hid it and kept it hidden until I was old enough . . . or you were strong enough to help me find it. If she’d had time to create other sea eggs, all this wouldn’t have been necessary!”
He nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “But, since there was only one egg, you were her only hope. Precious Hope. Your mother wouldn’t have chosen all those years of pain if there had been another way.”
“But it was still only a hope, because then they had to find you! They needed to find a mate for me with the right genetics, just as my mother had needed to find my father. Because they needed one more. Oh, I hope she knew I was going to be a girl. If she didn’t know, how she must have worried. If I’d been a boy, it wouldn’t have done any good, because there’d have been no more sea eggs.”
He put his arms around her, pulling her close. “But you were a girl, for which I am very grateful.”
“Yes. I am female. And I’ve laid a dozen sea eggs, and I’ve given you one, and I??
?m producing more of them, so now we have enough to give others. And if the sea egg you swallowed works, we will have children who can change and our daughters will also be able to lay sea eggs. Our children will live. Any couple that we give sea eggs to will live and their children will live. We start by giving them to men and women, then they connect with one another. The right women. The right men.”
Her voice tightened and she shivered in the circle of his arms.
“You hate that? Being controlled?”
She looked into his face, so familiar to her that she might have always known it. “No. Abasio, no, I really don’t. I hate the idea of being predisposed, prearranged. But I don’t hate the reality, not now. I hate the thought I could not choose, but I would not have chosen differently. It’s a dilemma, isn’t it? Precious Wind says it’s how all young people feel when they grow up. They do not wish to be like their parents, and yet very often they end up choosing to be like their parents.”
He held her close. “I’ve never asked you, Xulai. Do you love me?”
“I loved Xu-i-lok. I love Oldwife Gancer. I love my horse. I loved Fisher. I would not have lost any of them. I would rather lose myself than lose you. Should it be more than that? How do I know?”
“So you want me with you? Always? So you’d grieve my loss? Would you leap between me and certain death?” He laughed harshly. “I would answer yes to any of those questions about you, though I’d prefer not to find the last one necessary.”
“Well, do you love me, Abasio? Will you come under the sea with me? Will you chat with my sea father and live as part octopus?”
His face clouded. “How do octopuses . . . you know?”
She laughed at his expression. “It’s what the Sea King calls ‘an arm’s-length transaction.’ As soon as he said it, I remembered it was in the book I borrowed from the abbey library. The males give the females a sperm packet. The females store it inside themselves, then they use it when they get ready to plant their egg packets. I absolutely know there has to be some biological incentive, some hormonal or sensory drive, but the Sea King spoke of it as though he were . . . simply being accommodating. ‘Here, madam, you seem a pleasant cephalopod, please accept this with my compliments.’ ”
“Isn’t it nice to have the choice of methods?” Abasio croaked from a throat suddenly tight and painful.
She drew away from him. “I’m not sure we have that choice. Sea-egg people will evidently be part human, part octopus-who-talks, but the Sea King is all octopus-who-talks. The only humanity he has is in the design of his vocal apparatus. I don’t think his children can change. With the waters rising, there’d be no point in that.”
“So when there is no more land, how will we procreate?”
She shook her head. “Well, if we’re not totally different, we sea eggers, I can think of one possibility. I had the idea when the lady served tea . . . Precious Wind and I used to drink tea at Woldsgard. The foresters cut chunks of ice from the glaciers up in the Icefangs, and we kept the ice in an icehouse and in summer we had iced tea. And thinking about ice made me remember reading that the north and south poles were frozen. And I wondered if they wouldn’t still be frozen with the waters rising. That’s where the walruses and seals have their babies, don’t they? Won’t the ice bears and the penguins and the other creatures who live in those cold lands go on living there? And didn’t men used to live in those snow lands? Couldn’t men still live there? In the coldest parts, couldn’t people even make ships out of ice?”
He thought about this. “You mean, people who are given sea eggs could live out of the sea, or they could live in both places? Or just go there to procreate?”
“I can imagine us going north to have babies. We build a hut on an ice . . . raft, is that what they call it? And it floats south, and by the time it melts, we’re ready to take the baby underwater. Something like that.” She sighed, her face crumpled in dismay. “I killed Jenger. Now I remember doing it. I even remember why, though it was the part of Xu-i-lok in me who actually impelled me to do it. If he had raped me, if he had impregnated me, it would have ruined everything. It could not be allowed to happen, so I, she, killed him. I did it by taking a sea shape even though I was on land. The Sea King was out of the water a lot of the time today while we talked. So, we should still be able to take sea shapes and live out of the water part of the time. And if someday so much water freezes at the poles that the oceans go down again, then there would be a place for land creatures, wouldn’t there? If we keep seeds. If we keep animals, or their patterns. If we keep Clan Do-Lok’s laboratories on the ice when Tingawa is covered with water?”
“I think Clan Do-Lok has made provisions for its laboratories, even underwater. I worry more about Precious Wind’s wolves.”
“She might have thought of it. Precious Wind thinks of most things.”
They sat longer. Abasio was searching himself for feelings of revulsion, rejection, or fear, finding vague shadows, nothing he could not manage. Xulai was remembering the ocean, the sheer, bubbling delight of the ocean.
Abasio said, “If you’re distributing sea eggs, I think Artemisia might be one place to start—after Tingawa. I think you’ll find a high proportion of the right kind of people.”
“The right people! The refugees,” she cried. “Abasio, the Sea King told me who they really are . . .” She told him what she had learned, including the winks and nods given to her while they were climbing the great cliff. “So many people, counting on us, depending on us, and we still don’t know what we do about the monster. He’s still intent upon ruining everything, and I’m so afraid he actually can! If he can detect those who have been given sea eggs, he’ll kill them. He’ll kill them all.”
Neither of them could believe otherwise, and they sat in baffled silence, side by side, unmoving, until they looked up to see Xulai’s father and grandfather rounding the end of the little island and returning slowly along the sand. Their faces expressed what Abasio had felt earlier: intense curiosity mingled with extreme apprehension. Xulai and Abasio stood up and went to greet them, seeing the older men’s expressions change and soften as they came nearer.
“It’s all right,” said Justinian. It could have been a statement or a question.
Xulai took his hand and drew him close between them. “It’s all right.” She reached up to pat his cheek. “We’re not totally comfortable with all this. We’re nowhere near understanding all this. We’re not sure we can manage it. But we’re not afraid of it.”
Over her father’s shoulder, she smiled into her grandfather’s eyes and he bowed to her, to Abasio, and turned away so they would not see his tears.
“So you met the Sea King,” said Precious Wind. “I never have. What did you think of him?”
“A very large, very smart creature who looks nothing at all like a human being,” said Abasio. “And who, nonetheless, seems very humane.”
They were dining in their common room, the food brought to them, they were told, by the same people who served those of Clan Do-Lok who lived in the citadel. Many of the clan had homes elsewhere, but those who did live there shared a common kitchen and people to provide their daily needs. Abasio, who liked to know people’s names and what they were like and where they lived, found himself frustrated at not seeing any of the same people twice. Each meal, it seemed, new people arrived, served them, bowed pleasantly but not at all obsequiously, and departed. Precious Wind said that because everyone wanted to see them, the opportunity was being passed around.
When their intimate group was left alone, Xulai took from her lap the small box that she and Abasio had taken from the forest so long ago. She set it on the table and opened it. It now held the twelve sea eggs she had cut out of her undershift that evening after returning to the citadel.
“I had thirteen,” she said. “I gave Abasio one in Merhaven. He swallowed it. I want you and Clan Do-Lok to decide who gets these. You know your people better than I do, and these will change six men and six women. I hope to h
eaven they’ll come out even when they are recognizing mates and that none of them need to run off across what’s left of the world to find someone.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Precious Wind asked, staring at the little box as though at a miracle. “We’ve been waiting, wondering. I told everyone, all the workers and planners, they were not allowed to ask you! Oh, this is wonderful. Once there are several couples, the number of sea eggs produced will increase exponentially. Within a year, we could have hundreds or more . . . what shall we call them? Sea-fertile people?”
“Let me be sure I understand this whole thing,” said Abasio. “A woman who is given a sea egg can produce sea eggs. Her female children cannot, however, unless their father has also received a sea egg. Xulai can produce sea eggs because her mother could and because Justinian’s genetics were already the same as the sea egg would have given him, right? It’s the same with Xulai and me. Justinian and I couldn’t change into . . . another form without the eggs, but we could father children who could.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I have a little trouble remembering what part of the situation is which.”
Precious Wind nodded. “If both father and mother have had sea eggs, or if one of them has and the other is already genetically compatible, then their children, male and female, will be sea fertile as well as able to change. Being able to change will be critical as the waters’ rising goes on. So, since genetic compatibility is very rare—we were lucky to find Justinian, but it took years and a number of false starts to find Abasio—our first priority is to increase the number and distribution of sea eggs as quickly as possible.”
Xulai said, “Also, the distribution must be as wide as possible, assuring that both men and women all over the world get them. No people or group should feel they are being left out. Assuming each sea-fertile woman produces as many as I have, each woman should pass on at least a dozen every year. By the time the waters’ rising has completed, all children should be changeable.”