Beyond the Pale: A fantasy anthology (6 page)

Kokinja shook her head silently. The Shark
God said, “I cannot tell you in years, because there were no such things at my
beginning. Time was very new then, and Those who were already here had not yet
decided whether this was...
suitable,
can you understand me, dear one?”
The last two words, heard for the first time in her life, caused Kokinja to
shiver like a small animal in the rain. Her father did not appear to notice.

“I had no parents, and no childhood, such
as you and your brother have had—I simply
was,
and always had
been, beyond all memory, even my own. All true enough, to my knowledge—and
then a leaky outrigger canoe bearing a sleeping brown girl drifted across my
endless life, and I, who can never change... I changed. Do you hear what I am
telling you, daughter of that girl, daughter who hates me?”

The Shark God’s voice was soft and
uncertain. “I told your mother that it was good that I saw her and you and
Keawe only once in a year—that if I allowed myself that wonder even a day
more often I might lose myself in you, and never be able to find myself again,
nor ever wish to. Was that cowardly of me, Kokinja? Perhaps so, quite likely
unforgivably so.” It was he who looked away now, rising and turning to face the
darkening scarlet sea. He said, after a time, “But one day—one day that
will
come—when you find yourself loving as helplessly, and as certainly
wrongly, as I, loving against all you know, against all you are... remember me
then.”

To this Kokinja made no response; but by
and by she rose herself and stood silently beside her father, watching the
first stars waken, one with each heartbeat of hers. She could not have said
when she at last took his hand.

“I cannot stay,” she said. “It is a long
way home, and seems longer now.”

The Shark God touched her hair lightly.
“You will go back more swiftly than you arrived, I promise you that. But if you
could remain with me a little time...” He left the words unfinished.

“A little time,” Kokinja agreed. “But in
return...” She hesitated, and her father did not press her, but only waited for
her to continue. She said presently, “I know that my mother never wished to see
you in your true form, and for herself she was undoubtedly right. But I... I am
not my mother.” She had no courage to say more than that.

The Shark God did not reply for some
while, and when he did his tone was deep and somber. “Even if I granted it,
even if you could bear it, you could never see all of what I am. Human eyes
cannot”—he struggled for the exact word—“they do not
bend
in
the right way. It was meant as a kindness, I think, just as was the human gift
of forgetfulness. You have no idea how the gods envy you that, the forgetting.”

“Even so,” Kokinja insisted. “Even so, I
would not be afraid. If you do not know
that
by now...”

“Well, we will see,” answered the Shark
God, exactly as all human parents have replied to importunate children at one
time or another. And with that, even Kokinja knew to content herself.

In the morning, she plunged into the waves
to seek her breakfast, as did her father on the other side of the island. She
never knew where he slept—or if he slept at all—but he returned in
time to see her emerging from the water with a fish in her mouth and another in
her hand. She tore them both to pieces, like any shark, and finished the meal
before noticing him. Abashed, she said earnestly, “When I am at home, I cook my
food as my mother taught me—but in the sea...”

“Your mother always cooks dinner for me,”
the Shark God answered quietly. “We wait until you two are asleep, or away, and
then she will come down to the water and call. It has been so from the first.”

“Then she
has
seen you—”

“No. I take my tribute afterward, when I
leave her, and she never follows then.” The Shark God smiled and sighed at the
same time, studying his daughter’s puzzled face. He said, “What is between us
is hard to explain, even to you. Especially to you.”

The Shark God lifted his head to taste the
morning air, which was cool and cloudless over water so still that Kokinja could
hear a dolphin breathing too far away for her to see. He frowned slightly,
saying, “Storm. Not now, but in three days’ time. It will be hard.”

Kokinja did not show her alarm. She said
grimly, “I came here through storms. I survived those.”

“Child,” her father said, and it was the
first time he had called her that, “you will be with me.” But his eyes were
troubled, and his voice strangely distant. For the rest of that day, while
Kokinja roamed the island, dozed in the sun, and swam for no reason but pleasure,
he hardly spoke, but continued watching the horizon, long after both sunset and
moonset. When she woke the next morning, he was still pacing the shore, though
she could see no change at all in the sky, but only in his face. Now and then
he would strike a balled fist against his thigh and whisper to himself through
tight pale lips. Kokinja, walking beside him and sharing his silence, could not
help noticing how human he seemed in those moments—how mortal, and how
mortally afraid. But she could not imagine the reason for it, not until she
woke on the following day and felt the sand cold under her.

Since her arrival on the little island,
the weather had been so clement that the sand she slept on remained perfectly
warm through the night. Now its chill woke her well before dawn, and even in
the darkness she could see the mist on the horizon, and the lightning beyond
the mist. The sun, orange as the harvest moon, was never more than a sliver
between the mounting thunderheads all day. The wind was from the northeast, and
there was ice in it.

Kokinja stood alone on the shore, watching
the first rain marching toward her across the waves. She had no longer any fear
of storms, and was preparing to wait out the tempest in the water, rather than
take refuge under the trees. But the Shark God came to her then and led her
away to a small cave, where they sat together, listening to the rising wind.
When she was hungry, he fished for her, saying, “They seek shelter too, like anyone
else in such conditions—but they will come for me.” When she became
downhearted, he hummed nursery songs that she recalled Mirali singing to her
and Keawe very long ago, far away on the other side of any storm. He even sang
her oldest favorite, which began:

When a
raindrop leaves the sky,

it turns
and turns to say good-bye.

“Good-bye,
dear clouds, so far away,

I’ll come
again another day....”

“Keawe never really liked that one,” she
said softly. “It made him sad. How do you know all our songs?”

“I listened,” the Shark God said, and
nothing more.

“I wish... I
wish
...” Kokinja’s
voice was almost lost in the pounding of the rain. She thought she heard her
father answer, “I, too,” but in that moment he was on his feet, striding out of
the cave into the storm, as heedless of the weather as though it were flowers
sluicing down his body, summer-morning breezes greeting his face. Kokinja
hurried to keep up with him. The wind snatched the breath from her lungs, and
knocked her down more than once, but she matched his pace to the shore, even
so. It seemed to her that the tranquil island had come malevolently alive with
the rain; that the vines slapping at her shoulders and entangling her ankles
had not been there yesterday, nor had the harsh branches that caught at her
hair. All the same, when he turned at the water’s edge, she was beside him.

“
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.”