He looked up, studying the steep, erratic walls of the cleft, and down again, tightlipped. “I can make it,” he said. “You lead.”
She nodded, glancing at him for a moment as if she was uncertain; but she turned back to the rock face and began to climb up it. He watched where and how she chose every handhold, every foothold. As the slack began to disappear from the line between them, he pushed to his feet, swaying. Sudden dizziness took him, and he rested for a moment against the wall of rock, steadying himself. And then, grimly, he began to climb.
His body did not betray him. Bruised and stiff and trembling with cold, it made the climb, compensating with balance and skill for the one arm that he could barely use. For once in his life, he was grateful to the water of death.
They reached the top of the crevice at last. He laughed once, in triumph, in amazement at the beauty of the day, standing now in the spot where he had stood before, and known nothing but the need to kill.
The woman had already begun to make her way on down the rock slope toward the beach. He hesitated; felt the rope pull taut around his waist. Too spent to resist, he followed her down.
She stood waiting for him on the dark gravel among the mers, the waves breaking like glass around her; bare-legged, with foam swirling over her ankles like lace skirts billowed by the wind. He sagged against a boulder as exhaustion hit him; unspeakably glad to be on solid ground again. The mers lay on the beach around him, regarding him without concern or apparent curiosity. But the woman was staring at him now, her intentness making up for their lack of interest.
He stayed well away from the waterline, and as far from the mers as the rope would let him, gazing back at her. She was very young, he realized; not much more than a girl. He felt an odd surprise, realizing that he had barely gotten past believing that she was not the Goddess. At least, now that he saw her clearly, she was not actually haloed in silver, and casting off rainbows. It was only that her hair was so pale it was almost white; she had the exotic coloring he sometimes saw among the locals, blindmgly fair, beautiful in a way that was unnerving to him. Her imported wetsuit had a vaguely opalescent sheen, giving off faint echoes of color when the sunlight struck it. He realized that the sun was out now, wearing a corona of rainbow behind the burnished haze of the sky.
He looked down at the rope around his waist, still binding him to her like an umbilical; looked up at her mutely, hearing the mers around him, hearing the song of the sea. He put his hands on the line, holding it but making no move to untie it.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, when he did not speak—asking him the question he could not force himself to ask her. He hesitated. “I’m, uh … a researcher.”
“You came to study the mers?”
“Yes,” he said finally, his fatigue-deadened mind refusing to come up with a better answer.
“For the Hegemony?” She half frowned.
Something in her expression and the tone of her voice told him to answer, “No.”
“For my mother, then?”
“Who’s your mother?”
She looked at him oddly. “The Queen.”
The Summer Queen. Gods— He bit his tongue. “You’re her daughter?” he repeated, hearing his own incredulity. He remembered hearing that the Queen had a daughter. But he had heard that she was a sullen, spoiled brat.
“She’s my mother. I suppose that makes me her daughter.” The girl began to move toward him. “I’m Ariele Dawntreader.” She stopped in front of him, gazing up into his face with disconcerting fascination. He stared back at her, trying to decide what color her eyes really were. “Are you all right?” she asked, and he felt her hand touch his aching shoulder.
He winced. Her hand fell away, although it had not been pain, but only memory that had hurt him then. He glanced down, avoiding her eyes as he remembered how she had found him, helplessly drowning in his own stupidity and crying like a baby. Looking away, he saw a mer nearby that seemed to watch him with an interest the others did not show. He remembered the one that had found him in the cleft. He wondered if this was the same one. He couldn’t tell; they all looked alike.
“I know you …” Ariele Dawntreader murmured suddenly. “Don’t I?”
He looked back at her. “No,” he said hoarsely, even as his eyes searched her face, looking for some feature he recognized.
“You were at Starhiker’s the night it opened. You helped me win at Starfall. …” A strange look came into her agate-colored eyes. She moved a little closer.
“I don’t remember you,” he said bluntly, telling the truth. He put his own hand up to his aching shoulder.
Her gaze flickered down, broken by his stubborn lack of response. “You’re not Tiamatan,” she said, changing the subject with reluctant resignation. “Where do you come from?”
“Offworld.”
She looked up at him, raising her eyebrows. “Don’t you have a home?”
“I’ve lived a lot of places,” he said. He shrugged, and was sorry he had.
She stared at him, unblinking.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, finally. Emphasis on the you.
“Studying the mers too. We’ve been working on communicating with them since long before you arrived.” Pride mixed with challenge in her voice.
“I know,” he said. He wanted to ask her why in the name of the Render communicating with the mere was such a high priority for the Summer Queen, when doing blood research on them was on her forbidden list. He didn’t ask, afraid that he was expected to know that too. Maybe it was all a part of the mystical religious bullshit she was supposed to be obsessed with.
He glanced at her daughter again, standing in front of him, bare-legged and stringy-haired, looking all of fifteen. In her resolute, perfect innocence she seemed to belong here, to this place, like the mere, the stones, the sea. He had a sudden, strobing memory of her in a silver-spangled bodysuit, appearing in front of him like an hallucination in the eerie, shifting shadowplay of a gaming hell; of her pressing her body against his, and his own body unexpectedly responding. … He shook his head, and she looked at him in confusion, as if she thought he meant something by it. She seemed to him all at once to be as unfathomable as the creatures gathered around her … like most Tiamatans did; like most human begins did.
He rubbed his face with cold-whitened fingers. “You spoke to that mer, down in the hole, when I was trapped … or did I imagine that?” He realized that he had not thanked her for rescuing him. He did not thank her.
She turned away from him, calling out, “Silky!” A series of the same trills and clucks he remembered followed it out of her mouth, as naturally as human speech.
The mer he had imagined had been staring at him swiveled its head at the sound, and began to waddle toward them across the beach. It was a young one, he realized, smaller than the adults, and female, from the golden V on its chest. He watched it come, pulling at his ear, part of him suddenly trembling, wanting to bolt from its alienness. And yet his hands ached with the need to feel its heavy, brindle fur, knowing somehow exactly the depth and incredible softness of its silken undercoat…. “You own this mer?” he asked.
She looked at him as if he had suggested something obscene. “No one owns the mers. She’s a—friend. Aunt Jerusha—Commander PalaThion—raised her, she was orphaned…. This is Silky.” Ariele held out her hand, indicating the mer, and made more merepeech. The mer whistled back at her, and sneezed abruptly. Ariele laughed, and put her arms around the slender neck as the mer butted her gently. “She says, ‘And what is your name?’ “
“No, she didn’t,” Reede said. He came forward, and the mer’s head moved toward his outstretched hand. As he touched its body, he felt his own lips and tongue come alive and make the same kind of alien speech, in answer to it.