The Goodventure elder looked up, startled out of watching her shadow precede her across the grass. “How are they in danger, now that the offworlders have left us in peace? They will increase their numbers while Summer is here; they always do This is their time of mating and rebirth, when the Summer colonies migrate north, and join the Winter colonies.”
“Is it?” Moon said. “Are you sure?” She had heard it as casual lore, but she had no records to compare it to.
Capella Goodventure looked disdainful. “It is part of the common knowledge about the mers. You should have spent more of your time studying the ways of your people.”
“I intend to, from now on,” Moon murmured, as sudden urgency took the sting out of the other woman’s sardonic reprimand. She was not sure how accurate the Summers’ knowledge was; but any new resource they could add to what they had already observed could only help them.
“What makes you say they are in danger?” Capella Goodventure repeated impatiently. “The offworlders won’t be back for nearly a century. And even you have not dared to suggest we begin murdering the Lady’s Children ourselves and drinking their blood to stay young.”
Moon flushed again, and bit her tongue. “We don’t have a lifetime or more before the offworlders come back,” she said flatly. “We have maybe three years.”
Capella Goodventure looked at her as if she had suddenly gone insane.
Moon rubbed her arms, inside the loose, shell-clattering sleeves of her shirt. “I have learned in sibyl Transfer that the offworlders have discovered a source of the stardrive plasma the Old Empire used. They’re building starships right now that can reach Tiamat without using the Black Gates. They don’t have to wait. When the starships are ready, they’ll come.”
Capella Goodventure’s stare turned incredulous, and then disturbed, as she absorbed the full implication of the words. “Lady’s Eyes—” she murmured, walking a few more steps lost in thought. And then she looked up again. “So,” she said. “This was the Lady’s plan.” Moon hesitated, wondenng against hope whether the Goodventure elder had finally understood what she had been trying for so long to make her see But then the other woman smiled bitterly. “You strove to make us like the offworlders, to make us forget our old ways and be like them. And now that blasphemy has brought the Lady’s curse down on you—perhaps on all of us. The offworlders will return with their technology, which you wanted to possess so badly. And they will put the Winters back into power and throw you into the Sea, like the Motherlorn, unnatural creature you are—”
Moon caught the Goodventure woman’s sleeve, jerking her around as they reached the edge of the cliff; as she heard her own unspoken fears mock her from the other woman’s lips. “Are you blind as well as deaf, Capella Goodventure? Goddess! Why can’t you see that all I’ve done to change Tiamat has been to keep us from losing everything to the offworlders when they come back again? Not because I love what they are that much more than what we are! They have things, and ways of doing things, that we can profit from—just as we have things they could profit from understanding, like … reverence … for the mers. Even your own people know that, or they wouldn’t be using that synthetic silkcloth as a tent to shade food that’s been stored in those insulated coolers for the festival!” She gestured fiercely back the way they had come. “But that isn’t the point. The point is that I’ve done everything that I’ve done for the single purpose of protecting the mers.”
Capella Goodventure snorted. “You can’t make me believe that.”
“The … Lady told me that I would have to save them. That it was more important to Her than anything else. That I was Her tool, that I must do anything that as necessary to help the mers, because they … they are … sacred to Her.”
She stumbled over the words, hearing them fall awkwardly on her own disbelieving ears. She hoped that Capella Goodventure would not hear her doubt, but only her desperate urgency. She looked up again, realizing that she had always had a genuine reason in her heart for protecting the mers, one which needed no deeper explanation. “The mers saved my life, once. I would do the same for them, if I can.”
Capella Goodventure was silent now, her eyes hard but clear, her face expressionless; listening, at last.
“I have worked all these years to give us independence, so that the mers would never be slaughtered again. But now everything has changed again—for all of us, like it or not. The offworlders are coming back too soon, we aren’t ready, and they will slaughter the mers before the mers have had a chance to rebuild their colonies They’ll go on killing them, in blind greed, until they’ve killed every single one. And that will be a tragedy beyond imagining, not only for us but for them. We will all be … under the Lady’s curse. Unless I can find some other way to prevent it”
“And how do you think that can be done?” Capella Goodventure asked finally, with doubt still in her voice, but at least without hostility.
Moon started down the steep, narrow stairs, watching her feet; glancing back as she beckoned Capella Goodventure after her. “The Lady has shown me the truth about the mers: that they are … intelligent beings, just as we are.”
“You believe this?” Capella Goodventure asked. Moon realized her incredulity was not for the words themselves, but for hearing them spoken by someone she believed had turned her back on the tradition that held the mers sacred.
“I believe it as profoundly as I believe in my own existence,” Moon answered. “They have a language of their own. One of the things that I have been doing—with the sibyls of the College—is studying their language, so that we can find a way to communicate with them. If we can do that successfully, we may be able to warn them of their danger, at least.”
Moon had reached the foot of the steps now. She nodded to Jerusha and Miroe, who stood together on the pier. Behind her she heard Capella Goodventure’s footsteps stop suddenly.
“What do they want?” Capella Goodventure asked. “Why have you brought them here? They’re not welcome—”
Sudden motion in the water interrupted her, as a mer’s head and long, sinuous neck appeared suddenly beside the two waiting figures. Silky looked quizzically at Jerusha and Miroe, away at the new arrivals, and back at them. Jerusha crouched down, murmuring something inaudible, stroking the merling’s head. The Goodventure elder watched as if she were hypnotized.
“I asked them to come because she is theirs,” Moon said softly.
“No one owns a mer,” Capella Goodventure snapped. “And certainly no offworlder has the right—”
“They raised her,” Moon said. “They found her orphaned on the shore about seven years ago. They are her family. She left the bay at Ngenet plantation, where she has lived all her life, and followed them here … because they asked her to. That’s why they’ve come. To show you that I’ve spoken the truth.”
Capella Goodventure went slowly past her, moving toward Jerusha and Miroe She moved as though every muscle in her body resisted it, as if she was helpless. under a compulsion. “Did you raise this merling?” she asked.
Miroe nodded. “We did.” Jerusha still crouched down, holding on to a mooring post for support as she coped with Silky’s head-butting caresses.
“How is that possible?” Capella Goodventure said bluntly, unable to reconcile what her eyes showed her. “You aren’t Tiamatan.”
“My family has lived on Tiamat for three generations,” Miroe said, looming over her, matching her irascibility with his own. Moon remembered her own first meeting with him, and felt a brief flash of pity for Capella Goodventure. “My wife chose to stay on Tiamat when the rest left here for good, because she preferred this world to anything she’d seen out there. How can we belong here less than you? Your own people came here as refugees from somewhere else, on a ship called the Goodventure. Only the mers are truly of this world.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jerusha and Silky. “I’ve studied the mers all my life. My life was protecting them in any way I could, until Winter’s end… . But it wasn’t enough. I don’t ever want to see again what I saw on my own shore—” He looked back at her.