The Tree of Water

  “I’ll bet,” Char muttered.

  “So unless you want everyone and everything around you to know what you are thinking, try not to get too excited or think too hard about something near a sunshadow. You wait until you’re in regular drift before doing that.”

  “Drift?”

  “Drift is just the normal current of the sea, the movement of the water. When there’s no storm, drift is just like being in the air of the upworld. You feel tugged by it when you are close to shore because of the tides, but once you are out in the Deep, you are barely aware of the drift around you unless it changes suddenly. And that usually means trouble is coming.”

  “Why did you think Madame Sharra was a sunshadow, then?” Ven asked.

  Amariel shrugged. “She looked like she wasn’t real, exactly. She seemed to be in a shaft of light that came from behind the walls of the Gated City. And while that beam started out in the Gated City, it ended in your head. Which was, I might add, lying at the moment on a box waiting to have gills cut in the neck below it.”

  “Really?” Ven exclaimed.

  “Yes. Very powerful people—like the Sea King—can use sunshadow to send messages or even objects across wide expanses of ocean, just by the strength of their thoughts. So it seems to me that this golden woman who you saw in your head is really in the Gated City, but she was sending you a message, and perhaps your bubble and shell, using a land sunshadow.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “All right. Enough mouth talking. It’s making me tired. The tide’s going out—are we leaving with it?”

  “Absolutely,” said Ven. “Let’s go.”

  “Hold up a minute,” Char said quickly. “Can we at least try out these bubble-stone things before we get in over our heads?”

  “Sure,” said Ven. “Hold your breath, and we will just walk out behind Amariel into the harbor. If it works the way it should, the stone should breathe for you. You’ll know whether or not that’s happening pretty quick.”

  Char sighed. “That’s really not what I meant.”

  “Follow me,” said the merrow. “And, for goodness’ sake, if we come upon a shark, hold still and don’t make any noise or movement until I discover if it’s one of my friends or not. They can tell where you are by your movements. And your smell, of course, especially if you’re bleeding. If you’re bleeding, my friends might eat you by mistake—or even me. Blood in the water kind of cancels out any notion of politeness or friendship.”

  Ven thought back to a sight he had witnessed aboard the Serelinda, the ship that had rescued him from drowning, on which Char had served as a cook’s mate. A giant fin, tall as the mainmast, had surfaced from the Deep, belonging to a prehistoric creature that had caused the hardened sailors of the Serelinda to freeze in terror.

  “What about a shark like Megalodon?” he asked. “Isn’t he so big that our blood would be of no notice to him? He’s longer than the biggest ship I’ve ever seen moored at my father’s factory.”

  Amariel shook her head.

  “His pilot fish would notice even the smallest amount of blood,” she said. “Megalodon is frightening, but the pilot fish is said to be utterly evil. He clings to Megalodon, helping guide him through the sea, and feeds off the scraps left behind from whatever Megalodon devours. And there always are some. You better hope we only meet sharks that are friends of mine.”

  Char swallowed nervously.

  “I don’t suppose Megalodon is a friend of yours,” he said, half joking, half hopeful.

  Amariel’s voice was cold as frost on winter ground, clear in the air of the upworld.

  “Megalodon has no friends,” she said. “Even the pilot fish isn’t his friend. The whole ocean fears him. Fortunately, it’s a big ocean, and he lives fairly deep in it, down in the Twilight Realm. He only comes up every now and then to hunt. You have both seen Megalodon once already in your lives. It’s pretty unlikely, unless you are very unlucky, that you will ever see him again. Especially if you don’t call his name once you’re underwater. Now, come on. The tide won’t wait.”

  * * *

  At first I was very afraid.

  I have been swimming most of my life, something about me that my family finds very upsetting, because Nain aren’t supposed to be able to swim. I learned to swim in salt water, because my family’s home and factory were in the seaside city of Vaarn, down on the harbor.

  So I am used to my eyes stinging from salt.

  It was hard to get out from under the dock. The small waves were more powerful than they seemed. They pushed us back toward shore even as they dragged at our feet. It took a few minutes to get out to where the water was over our heads.

  Because Char is a little taller than me, it happened to me first.

  The water closed over my nose and mouth. I tried not to panic and kept my mouth closed, but my breathing did not change. A moment later it was up over my eyes and ears, and that’s when I felt a big difference.

  Once my ears were under the water, all the sound of the upworld was gone. There was nothing but a pounding, like a heartbeat, in my head.

  I looked above me, and was surprised to see that the sky was still visible beneath the water’s surface. It moved and danced above the waves, which made me feel a little dizzy.

  Suddenly, something slithered across my hand and my attention was drawn away from the sky. I was surrounded by schools of small fish, darting in between Char, Amariel, and me, zipping back and forth with perfect speed. Amariel waved them away like a swarm of flies in the upworld.

  Char and I were so busy watching the fish that it took us several moments to notice that we were breathing underwater without any problem.

  * * *

  “Let’s keep going.”

  Ven could hear Amariel’s voice in his head. She was smiling, and her lips had not moved, but he had heard her as clearly as if she had been standing right beside him.

  “Lead on, Amariel,” he thought to himself.

  The merrow smiled more broadly, then nodded that she had heard him as well. She turned and headed out into the depths of the harbor, into the blue-green darkness streaked with dusty shafts of light.

  Char looked at him. Ven could feel his best friend’s sigh of despair in his skin. Then the two of them began swimming, as if walking in the air of the upworld, after her.

  The thrum of the ocean was so slight, so distant, that they did not notice the schools of fish suddenly stop, then scatter quickly into the deeper shoals.

  As if in fear for their lives.

  6

  Kingston Harbor

  * * *

  I have always liked words.

  It would not be honest to say that I was a great student back in Vaarn. Whenever the teacher was telling tales of history or geography, of places far beyond the small city in which I lived, he always had my complete attention. There was nothing more exciting to me than the prospect of exploring the world, or fighting in great battles, or solving riddles and puzzles. But when the lessons turned to mathematics, or spelling, or something else that failed to fire my imagination, I often found myself watching out the window of the schoolhouse, searching for pictures in the clouds.

  My mind wanders easily.

  My body wanders too, though much less easily, especially these days.

  But I have always had a fondness for words. When I was at school I spent many nights writing down each new word I learned that day by candlelight. This made my brothers, Leighton and Brendan, who shared a room with me, hurl shoes at my head. By the time I turned fifty on my last birthday, making me about twelve in human years, I had a very thick journal of nothing but words that had tickled my fancy. I have been told I have a good vocabulary for a lad my age.

  But nowhere in that thick volume would I have been able to find words that could describe what I saw all around me in the world beneath the waves.

  Because there are none.

  * * *

  The farther they got out into the harbor, the less the sa
nd on the bottom shifted. The water around them became clearer, and bluer. Seaweed floated everywhere, and the boys watched how Amariel flipped her tail and waved her arms to get it to move out of her way as she swam.

  “Not sure how we’re supposed to do that,” Char grumbled, slapping a patch of slippery weeds away. “I’ve only been in the sea a few minutes, an’ already I can see you sorta have to have a tail to survive here.”

  “Not everything in the sea has a tail, Chum,” said Amariel. The anger was gone from her voice now, replaced by excitement. “Only the lucky ones. If the crabs can survive without one, so can you.”

  Ven was not paying attention. He was watching a huge school of bright blue-and-yellow fish swim in and out of clumps of seaweed, above skittering shells that drifted toward the shore with each big wave.

  “The colors in the sea are so much different than they are in the upworld,” he said, marveling at a large, flat, many-legged creature, orange and flower-shaped, moving quickly along the bottom.

  “Careful of that,” Amariel warned. “That’s a sunflower starfish. It may look pretty, but it’s one of the hungriest creatures in the sea. I don’t know if you can hear the thrum, but there’s a whole colony of sea urchins screaming in fear up ahead. They can feel it coming, and they know that very few of them will escape being its lunch. They just can’t move fast enough.”

  Ven shuddered. “Madame Sharra said that everything in the sea is food to something else, and that the sea is always hungry. It was the last thing she said to me.”

  “That’s good advice,” said the merrow. “If you don’t pay attention, it will be the last thing she said to you.”

  As the thrum of her words died away, a long pointed shadow appeared on the surface above her head.

  It was moving toward them, gliding in from deeper in the harbor, blocking the light as it passed. It dwarfed the school of fish swimming beneath it.

  Ven felt his heart pound hard against his rib cage.

  Shark, he thought. Shark.

  Instantly, the blue-and-yellow fish vanished.

  The sunflower starfish, now almost out of sight, froze. It buried the tips of its many legs into the sand and lay flat, all but disappearing into the bottom of the harbor.

  Char’s head whipped around, catching a clump of seaweed in his hair.

  “Shark? Where, Ven? Where?”

  Amariel spun around as well.

  “What? Where’s the shark? Hold still, for goodness’ sake, Chum.”

  Ven stopped moving as well.

  Above you, he thought, trying to think quietly.

  Amariel’s head did not move, but her eyes looked up. Then they returned to Ven. The thrum of her voice echoed in his ears, the tone sarcastic.

  “Sharks don’t have rudders, Ven,” she said. “That’s a fishing boat.”

  Ven looked up as well. Just as the merrow had said, what had looked like a tail on the shadow was just a piece of wood, like the hundreds he had seen manufactured in his family’s factory.

  Even in the cool seawater, he could feel his face turn hot.

  “How embarrassing,” he said. “I’m very sorry.”

  The merrow shrugged. “Don’t tell me—tell them.” She pointed at the hundreds of fish, now staring at him from within the seaweed. The sands at the bottom shifted as the sunflower starfish angrily pulled out its tentacles and shook them.

  “Sorry, everyone,” Ven repeated.

  The school of fish regrouped and swam off in a huff. Ven could feel their annoyance in their thrum. The starfish crawled away, its fury clear. In the distance Ven thought the sea urchins had made use of his mistake to gain some time and escape. Their thrum was farther away, and less frightened.

  “Well, at least the urchins made out well,” he said to Amariel and Char, who were floating next to him.

  “That’s not funny, Ven,” said the merrow sternly. “A shark warning is taken seriously by everyone in the sea. A false alarm doesn’t make you any friends, trust me.”

  “I’ll try to be more careful,” Ven promised.

  “You had better be. Come along, now.”

  The two boys followed the merrow as she swam farther out into the depths. The deeper they went, fewer shells dotted the sandy ocean floor. The sky, while still visible through the watery ceiling, was growing hazier. Only the sun was still clear, its rays spreading out in the green water, making shafts of light and shadow.

  “Where are we goin’, Amariel?” Char asked. “I’ve lost all bearings. Can you tell directions in the sea?”

  “Of course.” The merrow’s voice was disdainful. “Seafolk have a lot better sense of direction than land-livers do.”

  “I think what Char meant to ask was what are you taking us to see,” Ven said. “I’d like to know that as well. The harbor looks very different from underneath.” He looked up at the surface of the water and marveled at the number of ships and small boats sailing by above them, unaware of everything that lay beneath the waves.

  Just as he had been when they were on the decks of the Serelinda.

  “Well, besides showing you the harbor of your own land, I thought we might go outside it and explore the coral reef,” the merrow said. “This island is surrounded on almost every side by a huge wall of living creatures that protect it from storms and high seas. It might be nice for you to get to see them—and maybe say thank you.”

  “Good idea,” Ven said.

  “It will take a while to get to the reef—especially with you two slowpokes. We’ll be lucky if we get out of the harbor by nightfall. We’re heading north, so I guess we can make for the skelligs and sleep there tonight, then head west to the reef in the morning, when you can see all the colors and the creatures that live there.”

  “Skelligs?”

  The merrow sighed. “Black pointy hills in the sea off the coast. You sailed right past them on the way here.”

  “Oh, yes,” Ven said. “They look like dark teeth sticking out of the water not too far from shore.” Covered in mist, he thought.

  “A lot of merfolk and sea creatures like to hang out on the skelligs. Sea lions especially—merrows have to be careful of them, because the males are stupid and often mistake us for giant fish. It’s the last part of the upworld you will see for a while once we get there. After that we head out to the coral reef. The water there is still pretty shallow. The reef is very large, so it will take a while to get to the edge of it and out to the True Deep.”

  “What does that mean, True Deep?” Char asked nervously. “You mean the bottom of the sea?”

  “Don’t worry—we will never leave the Sunlit Realm, the shallowest part of the ocean,” Amariel said. “That’s where all the normal creatures and plants live, because the sunlight shines through the water there. Most of the ocean is far too dark and cold for anything but monsters to live there. No self-respecting sea creature goes below a hundred fathoms.”

  “Do merfolk use the same measure of a fathom that sailors do?” Ven asked.

  The merrow scowled. “I don’t know what sailors use. They’re humans, remember?”

  “Right, sorry. A fathom’s about six feet by human measure, about the size of a human man.”

  “That sounds about right. So the reef is very shallow, just a little bit over your head, for the most part. Once we’re past it, we will be in the True Deep, anywhere from five to one hundred fathoms to the bottom. That’s where the Sunlit Realm ends, and the Twilight Realm begins. We don’t want to go there—it’s a frightening place with very little light. Some really strange creatures live there that we would never want to meet up with. Twilight goes about five hundred fathoms deep, and then you’re at the place where all light dies, the Midnight Realm. But that’s very far away from here. Way too far for us to go, not that we would want to.”

  “I think exploring the Sunlit Realm sounds perfect,” said Ven. “The skelligs and the reef sound like great fun.”

  “Then, maybe, if you’re very good and things go well, we can trav
el past the reef and into the Sea Desert. That’s a challenge, because the desert is a pretty scary place. A lot of the big predators, the sharks and giant octopi, live there—and most of them are not my friends. But if we want to go to the Summer Festival—which we do—we’ll have to cross the desert. Believe me, it’s worth it.”

  “The Summer Festival? Isn’t that where you said you wanted to be a hippocampus rider in the great races there when you get older?” Ven asked.

  Amariel smiled. “You were listening, then,” she said. “I told you those stories when you were lying on that piece of driftwood after the explosion that blew up your ship. I wasn’t sure you were awake.”

  “I was somewhere between awake and asleep. But I remember those stories very well. I’ve never seen a sea horse—er, hippocampus—especially not a giant one big enough to be ridden. I think that would be a very exciting thing to see.”

  “Me too,” Char said.

  A thought suddenly occurred to Ven.

  “Do you know where there are any sea dragons, Amariel?” he asked.

  “No,” said the merrow. “Why?”

  “Because I think I am supposed to return the scale Madame Sharra gave me to a sea dragon,” Ven said. “She said it was important to discover the reason I am making this journey before it’s over. I think that may be part of the reason—to return this scale to the dragon who owns it, just like we did with Scarnag.”

  The merrow stared at him.

  “I thought the reason was to explore the Deep with me, as you’ve been promising to do since we met,” she said huffily. “I didn’t realize you needed another reason.”

  “I don’t,” Ven said quickly. “But I think perhaps Madame Sharra does. Or at least she expects me to do something for her while I’m here.”