“Mirali.” He said the one word, and pointed out into the flying, whipping spindrift and the solid mass of sea-wrack being driven toward land by the howling grayness beyond. Kokinja strained her eyes and finally made out the tiny flicker that was not water, the broken chip of wood sometimes bobbing helplessly on its side, sometimes hurled forward or sideways from one comber crest to another. Staring through the rain, shaking with cold and fear, it took her a moment to realize that her father was gone. Taller than the wavetops, taller than any ship’s masts, taller than the wind, she saw the deep blue dorsal and tail fins, so distant from each other, gliding toward the wreck, on which she could see no hint of life. Then she plunged into the sea — shockingly, almost alarmingly warm, by comparison with the air — and followed the Shark God.
It was the first and only glimpse she ever had of the thing her father was. As he had warned her, she never saw him fully: both her eyesight and the sea itself seemed too small to contain him. Her mind could take in a magnificent and terrible fish; her soul knew that that was the least part of what she was seeing; her body knew that it could bear no more than that smallest vision. The mark of his passage was a ripple of beaten silver across the wild water, and although the storm seethed and roared to left and right of her, she swam in his wake as effortlessly as he made the way for her. And whether he actually uttered it or not, she heard his fearful cry in her head, over and over—“Mirali! Mirali!”
The mast was in two pieces, the sail a yellow rag, the rudder split and the tiller broken off altogether. The Shark God regained the human form so swiftly that Kokinja was never entirely sure that she had truly seen what she knew she had seen, and the two of them righted the sailing canoe together. Keawe lay in the bottom of the boat, barely conscious, unable to speak, only to point over the side. There was no sign of Mirali.
“Stay with him,” her father ordered Kokinja, and he sounded as a shark would have done, vanishing instantly into the darkness below the ruined keel. Kokinja crouched by Keawe, lifting his head to her lap and noticing a deep gash on his forehead and another on his cheekbone. “Tiller,” he whispered. “Snapped. flew straight at me. ” His right hand was clenched around some small object; when Kokinja pried it gently open — for he seemed unable to release it himself — she recognized a favorite bangle of their mother’s. Keawe began to cry.
“Couldn’t hold her. couldn’t hold. ” Kokinja could not hear a word, for the wind, but she read his eyes and she held him to her breast and rocked him, hardly noticing that she was weeping herself.
The Shark God was a long time finding his wife, but he brought her up in his arms at last, her eyes closed and her face as quiet as always. He placed her gently in the canoe with her children, brought the boat safely to shore, and bore Mirali’s body to the cave where he had taken Kokinja for shelter. And while the storm still lashed the island, and his son and daughter sang the proper songs, he dug out a grave and buried her there, with no marker at her head, there being no need. “I will know,” he said, “and you will know. And so will Paikea, who knows everything.”
Then he mourned.
Kokinja ministered to her brother as she could, and they slept for a long time. When they woke, with the storm passed over and all the sky and sea looking like the first morning of the world, they walked the shore to study the sailing canoe that had been all Keawe’s pride. After considering it from all sides, he said at last, “I can make it seaworthy again. Well enough to get us home, at least.”
“Father can help,” Kokinja said, realizing as she spoke that she had never said the word in that manner before. Keawe shook his head, looking away.
“I can do it myself,” he said sharply. “I built it myself.”
They did not see the Shark God for three days. When he finally emerged from Mirali’s cave — as her children had already begun to call it — he called them to him, saying, “I will see you home, as soon as you will. But I will not come there again.”
Keawe, already busy about his boat, looked up but said nothing. Kokinja asked, “Why? You have always been faithfully worshipped there — and it was our mother’s home all her life.”
The Shark God was slow to answer. “From the harbor to her house, from the market to the beach where the nets are mended, to my own temple, there is no place that does not speak to me of Mirali. Forgive me — I have not the strength to deal with those memories, and I never will.”
Kokinja did not reply; but Keawe turned from his boat to face his father openly for the first time since his rescue from the storm. He said, clearly and strongly, “And so, once again, you make a liar out of our mother. As I knew you would.”
Kokinja gasped audibly, and the Shark God took a step toward his son without speaking. Keawe said, “She defended you so fiercely, so proudly, when I told her that you were always a coward, god or no god. You abandoned a woman who loved you, a family that belonged to you — and now you will do the same with the island that depends on you for protection and loyalty, that has never failed you, done you no disservice, but only been foolish enough to keep its old bargain with you, and expect you to do the same. And this in our mother’s name, because you lack the courage to confront the little handful of memories you two shared. You shame her!”
He never flinched from his father’s advance, but stood his ground even when the Shark God loomed above him like a storm in mortal shape, his eyes no longer unreadable but alive with fury. For a moment Kokinja saw human and shark as one, flowing in and out of each other, blurring and bleeding together and separating again, in and out, until she became dazed with it and had to close her eyes. She only opened them again when she heard the Shark God’s quiet, toneless voice, “We made fine children, my Mirali and I. It is my loss that I never knew them. My loss alone.”
Without speaking further he turned toward the harbor, looking as young as he had on the day Mirali challenged him in the marketplace, but moving now almost like an old human man. He had gone some little way when Keawe spoke again, saying simply, “Not only yours.”
The Shark God turned back to look long at his children once again. Keawe did not move, but Kokinja reached out her arms, whispering, “Come back.” And the Shark God nodded, and went on to the sea.
PETER S. BEAGLE was born in Manhattan in 1939, on the same night that Billie Holiday was recording “Strange Fruit” and “Fine and Mellow” just a few blocks away. Raised in the Bronx, Peter originally proclaimed when he was ten years old that he would be a writer. Today he is acknowledged as an American fantasy icon, and to the delight of his millions of fans around the world he is now publishing more than ever.
In addition to being an acclaimed novelist and writer of short stories and nonfiction, Peter has also written numerous plays, teleplays, and screenplays; and is a gifted poet, librettist, lyricist, and singer/songwriter. To learn more about The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place, I See By My Outfit, “Two Hearts,” and all the rest of his extraordinary body of work, please visit www.peterbeagle.com.