The Summer Queen (95 page)

“You’re wedged in. She’s going to push you up from below, if
she can. You understand? Hold on, be ready—”

He nodded, as the mer disappeared below the water surface.
He felt something moving, beneath his feet, the mer butting experimentally at
his legs, as it had before. Grimacing, he forced his legs to stay still, held
his numb limbs rigid against the overwhelming need to fight off the contact.
The mer’s body collided with his own, harder; jarring him from below. He cursed
as the shock rattled his teeth, rattled all through his aching body. But he
realized that he had felt something move—felt his body move, against the rocks.

The mer butted him again; its back heaved upward under his
feet. Ready for it, this time, he stiffened his legs against the blow, giving
it extra force, just as another swell came rolling into the cleft. He felt his
body grate, slip against the rocks, and rise, suddenly buoyant, suddenly free.

He shouted in elation. The woman scrambled to drag him onto
the ledge where she was crouching as the mer heaved him upward, ignominiously,
from below.

He lay on the ledge taking long, shuddering breaths; feeling
the solidness of stone supporting him now, safely above the level of the water,
and no longer holding him in a deathgrip. He clung to it, his mind a singing
emptiness, oblivious to the pain in his body, even to the woman who had saved
him. She searched in his pack for the length of line, tied it around his waist,
tied the other end around her own. At last, getting carefully to her feet, she
helped him pull himself up until he was kneeling beside her. “Do you think you
can climb? I can call for a rescue—”

He looked up, studying the steep, erratic walls of the
cleft, and down again, tight-lipped. “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, gnmly, 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 triumpn, 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.

Ariele Dawntreader gaped at him. “You really do know their
language,” she said, almost in disbelief.

He broke her gaze almost desperately, because he had no idea
what he had just said, why he had known how to shape the words, why he had
needed to make contact with the mer, feel that strange, cloud-soft fur against
his skin ....

He sank to his knees in the sand, not even sure if the
motion had been voluntary, or if his half-frozen body had simply given way; not
caring. The mer pulled free from Ariele Dawntreader’s grasp to explore him with
its face, snuffling, lipping, butting him, making murmurous conversation all
the while. He shut his eyes, letting his mind go, and heard his own voice
answer, like someone speaking in tongues.

How long their communion went on he did not know, because
time as he knew it ended and began in that moment, and contained eternity. He
only knew, when the merling left him at last, turning its back on him to make
its ungainly way toward its own kind again, that for that single moment he was
real .... And that inside his wasteland of violence and pain he rejoiced in his
captivity, because it had given him this moment in which the circle was completed,
in which he was made whole, one with his dream of the future ...

“You really understand,” Ariele was saying, over and over,
or maybe it was simply an echo in his nerve circuits. “You really understand
them ... you can teach us ....”

He shook his head, unable to form a single word of human
speech; unable to tell her the truth, even if he could have spoken. He tried to
get to his feet, needing to get away—from her, from here, from himself, before
he lost control completely.

He fell back again onto the sand, sat among the pebbles in a
kind of stupefied disbelief as his body refused to respond. Ariele kneeled down
beside him, still speaking although he could not understand anything she said
now. She began to pull at him, trying to force him up again.

Unwilling, but suddenly without any will of his own, he did
what she wanted him to do, and this time he succeeded in standing. She went on
asking him questions, and slowly he began to comprehend what she said.

“... get here? Where is your boat? Your boat—?” she
repeated, her face filled with concern.

“I don’t have one,” he muttered, finding his voice again in
a forgotten coat pocket of his mind. “No boat.”

She looked uncomprehending, now. “How did you get here?”

“I walked ....”He felt her body close against his, half
supporting him; remembered the gaming tables and the sudden, unexpected,
undesired hunger of his unruly body for the feel of a woman’s flesh against his
own ....

“From Carbuncle?” she said, in disbelief.

“No.” He frowned. “Down the beach. Rew in.” He looked over
his shoulder. “I sent it away.”

“Then I’ll take you back to the city in my boat. Come on.
You can’t stay here longer; you’re freezing to death, and your shoulder needs
treatment.” She pointed on along the shore, tried to lead him after her in that
direction.

“No,” he murmured. “I’ll call my own pilot.” He let his backpack
slip from his shoulder, wincing; fumbled for the remote among its sodden
contents. He pulled the remote out at last, dripping; called it on, and got no
response. He shook it, and drops flew; but it stayed silent, dead. He dropped
it, kicked it away. Still looking down, he saw the rope knotted around his waist;
he jerked at it in sudden fury, as if it had become the cause of all his confusion
and humiliation, or its symbol. Even his fingers would not obey him; he seemed
to be inhabiting a space where he did not function in realtime. He swore in
frustration, seeing the other end of the rope attached to Ariele Dawntreader’s
body.

Calmly, she gathered up the length of cord that lay trampled
in the sand between them, looping it over her hand, until she had left him no
slack. “It could take days before anyone comes back to look for you. You’ll be
sick or dead from exposure by then. Come on ...” she said gently. “I have dry
clothes on the boat, and some wine. Come with me—” Her fingers slid under the
rope around his waist, tugging slightly; but she only untied the knot, with
deft fingers, setting him free—as if he had some choice—before she untied the
rope around her own waist. “Let me take you back to the city. We can talk about
the mers, on the way ....”