He couldn’t get free. He couldn’t wrench himself loose from the seahorse. He was done, he realized. What gunpowder bombs had not stolen, the cool blue depths would take.
Finished, he thought. But dear God…I am not ready to—
A mouth clamped onto his. A breath of air forced itself into his lungs. Black hair swirled into his face. Something began sawing at the cord binding his wrists. A sharp edge grazed him. A piece of glass or a broken shell? He had to hold on a moment longer…just a moment, if he could…
His body shivered and jerked in involuntary battle against the oncoming dark. One moment more…just one…
He felt the cord give way, and the Indian girl had freed his hands.
There was still the rope binding body to seahorse. Wrapped around his waist. He grasped at it and pulled. Tighter than a swollen tick. Where was the knot? Somewhere underneath the horse? The girl’s mouth was suddenly on his again, feeding him more breath. He felt her sharp edge at work on the cord at his left side. Sawing frantically, it seemed; as frantically as he fought the pounding and the pain and the darkness reaching for him. He looked up, silver bubbles bursting from his mouth and nostrils because he just couldn’t hold the air in any longer. Sunlight shone on the surface above. How far? Thirty or forty feet? He could never make that.
She pulled at him. The cord had come loose enough for him to get free of it. He started desperately for the surface, but she yet pulled at him in another direction. Deeper, it seemed. He thought she must be insane, and he was not a merman to her mermaid; yet her pull was insistent and now she had her arm around him and was urging him to swim with her.
I am not finished, he thought in his anguished blue haze. I have much to do. I am not finished…but I must trust this girl.
And so he kicked forward with her as the silver bubbles bloomed from his mouth and nose, and three more kicks and the Indian girl was leading him downward still. She took him into a dark place, through some kind of opening. A cave? he thought, near letting his lungs either empty themselves or explode. But no, not a cave…
They swam a few seconds longer, and then she abruptly led him up and his head broke the surface and he tasted salty sweet air. He inhaled mightily with a shudder that racked his body and in the next instant was punished by spasms of retching. She held him up while he filled his lungs and emptied his belly. In the dark blue gloom he saw the stones of a wall to his right and two feet above his head the stones and rafters of a ceiling. He reached up with both hands to grasp hold of a rafter, finding the wood spongy but still able to bear his weight, and he hung there breathing hard, coughing viciously, and shivering with not the chill but the idea that death had been so very, very close.
“Oh my God,” Matthew rasped. And again, for he knew not what else to say: “Oh my God.”
“Don’t let go,” Fancy told him, her body pressed against his side and her own hands up to hold onto the near-rotted rafter. “Do you hear me?” Her English was perfect, not a trace of an accent.
“I hear,” Matthew said; more of a frog’s croak than human speech.
“Just breathe,” she said.
“No instruction…necessary,” he managed to answer, though he had to breathe through his mouth for his injured nostrils were nearly swollen shut. His head was still pounding, his heart about to beat through his chest, and his stomach roiling. He closed his eyes, for now a sick weakness was threatening to make his fingers open. If he slid back in just yet he was done for.
“You’re going to live,” she said.
He nodded, but he was thinking he would not bet on such a statement. His eyes opened and he again surveyed their surroundings. Not a cave, but…a building of some kind? “Where are we?”
“The town under the sea,” Fancy answered, her black hair pushed back from her forehead and her face a blue-daubed darkness. “I found it, nearly the first day I was here.”
Matthew thought his brain must still be fogged and burdened. “Town? Under the sea?”
“Yes. Many buildings. Some with air still caught in them. I swim here, many times.”
“A town?” Matthew still couldn’t make heads-or-tails of it. Possibly Fancy had seen him go over the balcony and had used broken glass from a window to cut him free. “Did they know?” He tried to clarify that: “The brothers. Did they know?”
“About this place? No. It fell away from the island in the earthquake, long years ago.”
“Earthquake,” he repeated, lapsing back into his parrotty pattern. That would go along with the tremors still being felt on Pendulum. He felt as if his head was full of mush. “Who told you this?”
“One of the servants. She was a child when it happened.”
Matthew nodded. He still felt numb and bewildered. It occurred to him quite suddenly, as if he hadn’t realized it before, that this beautiful creature pressed against him was quite naked.
“Who are you?” she asked. “You’re not like the others. You’re not part of them. So…who are you, really?”
“I can’t explain that,” he decided to say. “But I can tell you that I knew an Iroquois brave who was called He Runs Fast Too. He—”
“Came over on the ship with me,” Fancy interrupted. “And with Nimble Climber. How did you know him? And what happened to him?”
“He went back to your land. Back to the tribe. He…helped me do something important.”
“He’s dead now,” she said. “I can hear it in your voice.”
“Yes, he’s dead. And you were called—”
“I know what I was called. That was a long time ago.”
“Those two who have you. They—”
“I don’t wish to speak of them,” she said. “But I will say they do not have all of me. I always find a place to go. As here. In the silence, I can think. I can be.” She adjusted her grip on the beam because her fingers were sinking into the black rot. Her voice was quiet and distant when she next spoke. “I love this. This ocean. This blue world. It speaks to me. It hides me. It makes me feel safe.”
Matthew thought this was the only girl in the world who would feel safe forty-something feet underwater, with her head in a small breathing space in the ruins of a collapsed town. But he understood exactly what she meant.
“I can never go back,” Fancy told him. “Not to my land. Not to my people.”
“Why not? If I could get you out of here—and away from them—then why not?”
“You could never get me away from them.” It was said with a fair amount of smouldering anger. “They would kill you if you tried.”
Matthew said with a weak grin, “They’d have to do better than this, wouldn’t they?”
“They would do far better. I have seen them do…terrible things. And to me, also. I used to fight them, but I suffered for it. Now I don’t fight, but I still suffer. They enjoy that. It is their great pleasure in living.”
“I’m going to get you away from them.”
“No,” she answered, with the hardness of a stone that could not be moved, “you will not. Because even if you could—which you cannot—I have no place to go. Except another bed, in another room, in another house owned by another man. I am…how would you say…an item to be sought. Not so much now, as there are many others like me brought across the ocean. But I am still rare enough.”
Matthew couldn’t fully see her face in the blue gloom, but he had the impression of looking at someone who had long ago lost all ability to smile, and whose happiness was silence and peace taken at every possible moment. He didn’t wish to think what those rough hands and biting teeth had done to her. He didn’t wish to think what her eyes had seen.